Oolite Bulletins

Commander McLane wrote:

The ice-idea seems more suited for comets than for asteroids. We don't have any in Oolite yet... (hint )

What's the bounty on a non-hostile, but moving target?

Commander McLane wrote:

The ice-idea seems more suited for comets than for asteroids. We don't have any in Oolite yet... (hint )

How about simulating comets with big asteroids. Do asteroids have a role and an AI. If so, it must be possible to generate something that looks like comets.

Mmm... comets would be good.

Updated FDL w shading. I was playing this on a HUGE screen :) but it meant the overhead screenshots didn't work out. Also noticed that what you see in each view depends on the resolution?

I notice that the laser firing point seems to be fixed - the fwd laser fires between the prongs - but the normalmapping over the center still needs to be swapped. I've just been making two maps and intercutting them.

Now to catch up on comments so far ... should I start a new thread for my efforts so this one just gets the final results?

Kaks wrote:

Well, personally I think reflections are an integral part of the Griff look, so I wouldn't want that to change...

Well I'm not exactly disagreeing with you here. Some observations though - 1. not all the ships have the special "reflection" thing ... 2. when you encounter one, the special lighting has zero impact.

The place where it is effective is on player ships - so you can groove out on the pretty effects from the V modes ... though it gets tired after a while ... and in the previews: which adds to the skite mode (I've been showing them off in internet cafes that way).

Sure, it is possible to formation-fly with freindlies (= not hostile) and look at them - this gets you close enough to appreciate it, but you only get the benifit if the ship your are looking at changes orientation so again - gets dull fast.

There seems to be a choice between adding custom features or having the special lighting thing ... "Which adds more to the experience?" I asked myself.

There is probably a way of doing both - but I have note come up with a non clunky way so it will probably have to wait for the support.

All this does improve appreciation of shaders in movie CGI though.

re: the 'reflection' effect (the ' 's to show it's not a properly coded effect just a side effect of feeding a dotty spacefield texture into the some bits of the parallax shader code) - it works quite well on the vipers i think which is the ship the effect was originally built for, it helps sell them as some sort of highly polished well funded police force, i always thought the police would be crusing around in these expensive ships, the thargoids benefit from it too as the dots get repainted in vivid alien colours, in fact if i remember correctly the thargons are entirely randomly coloured, which works great for alien crazyness but i suppose it does also mean you get a lot of brown and pastel shade aliens about! i probably should have just limited the effect to those 2 types of ship but it's quite a handy shortcut to say 'this is polished metal' so it did turn up on a few other ships, especially the ones with blander texture maps, quick just bung the reflection map on it to tart it up a bit!

@Simon, wow that shader'd FDL looks great! definately deserves it's own thread

I like your shaders Griff, look great in the 'show room' Nice rocks by the way!
That's ace Simon, screams FDL NG to me.

heh, yeah, these are just a few rocks meant to tie in with the rock i made for the hermit earlier, it's a chance to muck around a bit again with some of the shader code we have working, hopefully there'll be some glowy space moss rocks and some with animated lava rivers, recently i was trying to use vertex shaders to spin my wreckage pieces for their oxp - i worked out the code to spin the verticies but couldn't fathom how to get the lighting to follow along correctly with the rotation, i couldn't get that working but in a happy accident i did get a sort of 'bubbling' effect but incorrectly animating the lightvector against a blobby normalmap which i might try out on a rock, not sure if it'll have to apply to the whole rock or if i can isolate it to certain parts of the texture, might be cool for rocks with pools of disgusting space gloop on them.
edit: oh yeah, and there's also A_C's discovery of a very nifty liquid metal effect using the parallax shader (looks like the Terminator 2 man), that needs to go in, might work really well as ice.

Those sound like seriously good ideas to me, beautiful astro debris is yet another angle Oolite can take to stand out, I've seen asteroids in other games and although they're very professionally done, they're a bit unloved on the creative side.
Kind of stopped on mine at the mo as I'm thinking I'll have to start again with a different angle to deal with my chosen method's parallax seams, but I will definitely return to it soon, getting the urge again. Trying to get them as beautiful as possible without any shaders involved, I'm learning slowly
@Simon.. Glad to see you about, and that's a very scrummy return. Any thoughts about helping update other willing OXP's to fit Griffs' stylings? Your ships are more than welcome in my Ooniverse

@ZygoUgo - dude, you totally don't need to start again, i've seen the preview pics of your asteroid WIP's and they are seriously amazing, i mean honestly, upload your demo asteroid pictures here and we will carry around you around the forum on our shoulders on a chair just like the bit in return of the jedi when cp-30 is worshipped by the ewoks, i mean seriously everyone, this guy has done stuff with the oolite graphics engine that is godlike, ZygoUgo you should change your forum avatar to a pic of the MCP from Tron

Well the problem is very evident at certain angles, the ends of the seams are folded up like dog-eared paper, but its been good to start me off, maybe what I should do is release what I'm doing and just keep updating it, it would give me more mOotivation to get on with it.
The idea is not just to replace the core asteroids but also add a visual element of depth to mining, as discussed with Ahruman.

Personally, I'm all for the release + update thing!

You should then get a chance to - ahem - 'leverage' our collective 3d knowledge try and help with the dog-eared paper problem. Once we finish gawping at the things, that is... (Ahruman showed me a screenshot a few moons ago, and it definitely was the bees knees! )

I don't know whether someone has mentioned this, but the new texture doesn't - on my system anyway - apply to the pirate rock hermits. And that makes those pirate bases too easy to distinguish from the legit rock hermits. Is there a hack to change this, please?

This oxp will like_ship the pirate coves to the griff rock hermit
http://www.box.net/shared/jrvsl58eno

It's a simple OXP with no clever code of it's own so it requires the Pirate Cove oxp and either of the griff rock hermit oxps (full or half size texture versions - don't install both!) to be installed alongside it.

In this oxp's Config folder is a shipdata-overrides.plist which rewrites the role of the original pirate cove to an unused role to stop it appearing in game, you'll just get the griff_hermit versions appearing, if you'd like both types to show up just delete shipdata-overrrides.plist from the config folder in this oxp and the next time you start Oolite hold down the shift key until the title screen appears (this forces oolite to re-read in all your oxps and notice the changes)