Oolite Bulletins

Commander McLane wrote:

Which ship are you flying? I'm interested to know which ship types need an adjustment of the firing position.

OK, I'm flying a fast ship (Contractor) on a slow machine, that makes sense. Thanks.

Commander McLane wrote:

... I wonder why SHIFT-F doesn't bring up the display for Commander Wilmot. This used to be a vanilla Oolite key. Has that changed to be only available in connection with Debug.oxp recently?

Apparently Commander Wilmot is using a HUD configuration which does not define the FPS display. This can result in the FPS not showing up when Shift-F is pressed. I had to add that definition myself in some of the new HUDs that have been published relatively recently.

Thanks.

Apparently Commander Wilmot is using a HUD configuration which does not define the FPS display. This can result in the FPS not showing up when Shift-F is pressed. I had to add that definition myself in some of the new HUDs that have been published relatively recently.

I do have a different hud installed.

Ahruman wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

How do you know that you have a 'decent' frame rate, if not by checking it? The only way to check it is to read it from the upper right corner of your Oolite window after pressing SHIFT-F.

The only way to know whether you have a “decent” frame rate is to consider whether it feels annoyingly jerky or not. No magic number will make a subjective judgement for you.

My computer would generally run at 40-50 fps, not great, but more than enough to keep a game like oolite running smoothly.

100 fps, McLane? Wow man, what kind of supercomputer are you running it on?

I'm doing good to squeeze 50 - 60 fps out of my game. What I'm seeing at that framerate is out of a 100-round magazine, only two to three shots actually hit. The rest pass right through the target - usually asteroids - without causing any noticeable damage at all.

Yeah, I'd like 100fps as well... I get between 60 and 64 on my machine, but the railgun seems quite effective.
I've taken out several bandits using only the railgun, and finished a Thargoid warship or two off with it, as well.

Cmdr Wyvern wrote:

100 fps, McLane? Wow man, what kind of supercomputer are you running it on?

MacBook Pro, 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5, NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M, 4 GB RAM. It is perhaps also important that I'm not running many shader-heavy OXPs. For instance I don't have any alternative ship set installed.

To test the new mining railgun I spawned enough Superhubs to bring my frame rate down to 15-20. It was a sight to behold, 30 Superhubs tumbling around a tiny main station. Then I spawned and asteroid and fired my projectiles at it. About two out of three shots were hits. So you shouldn't get a problem with the mining variant.

Version 1.2 of Railgun.oxp is now online and available for download via the  Elite Wiki.

Major change: this version contains a civil version of the weapon with much heavier but slower projectiles for asteroid mining. It also contains many minor tweaks, bug fixes and improvements. For a complete list see the history in the readMe.

NOTE: Railgun.oxp v 1.2 currently only works in trunk. Players who are using normal download versions of Oolite will have to wait until Oolite 1.75.2 comes out. For them v 1.1 is also still available on the Wiki page.

Re the 100 FPS thing: on Macs in windowed mode, the game runs on a 10 ms timer instead of being tied to screen refresh. In graphical terms, this is strictly worse than syncing to the screen, but it has advantages when you’re horribly abusing game physics that happens to be tied to graphical refresh rate. :-)

Doing it properly is much more tractable in modern versions of OS X (using Core Video), so this will probably be fixed for Oolite 2.

So it turns out that it fullscreen mode I have only 60 FPS displayed.

I never noticed the difference, because I never play in fullscreen.

Hi Commander McLane.

Version 1.2 is not working on either 1.75.2 test release or previous trunk 4554.

pressing n is not firing a projectile and is filling up the log with lots of:

06:00:05.984 [script.javaScript.exception.ooliteDefinedError]: ***** JavaScript exception (railgun-firing 1.2): Error: Ship.spawn: Invalid arguments (undefined) -- expected role and optional quantity (1 to 64).
06:00:05.984 [script.javaScript.exception.ooliteDefinedError]: Resources/Scripts/oolite-global-prefix.js, line 70.
06:00:06.062 [script.javaScript.exception.ooliteDefinedError]: ***** JavaScript exception (railgun-firing 1.2): Error: Ship.spawn: Invalid arguments (undefined) -- expected role and optional quantity (1 to 64).
06:00:06.062 [script.javaScript.exception.ooliteDefinedError]: Resources/Scripts/oolite-global-prefix.js, line 70.

I have got ammo in the save game.

I think it might be something to do with a missing missionVariable because I'm using a save that had the railgun installed from your previous release.

edit to add - confirmed - selling and repurchasing my railgun fixed the errors.

Yes, you're right.

As per Capt. Murphy's report:

The internal handling of the railguns and their projectiles has changed significantly between v 1.1 and v 1.2 of the OXP. Therefore, if you had already a railgun on your ship, and then updated to v 1.2, you need to sell and repurchase your railgun. Sorry for the inconvenience!

(I hadn't noticed because when I made the changes my test commander had no railgun. I always had to buy it first.)

I like the railgun! Good work and very original. It only need one thing more and that is: sound.
Its a bit silent.

I agree with pagroove: the gun is interesting (and must have been fairly difficult to code, I imagine) and/but some sound would improve it!

pagroove wrote:

I like the railgun! Good work and very original. It only need one thing more and that is: sound.
Its a bit silent.

... and therefore doesn't fit the Space Is Noisy-trope.

But seriously, I'd love to have a sound effect, perhaps two sound effects: one for firing, and one for hitting. You're the man for sounds, would you like to provide some?

(And while you're at it, I'd also love to have a sound effect for the fireworks from fireworks.oxp.)

Commander McLane wrote:

... and therefore doesn't fit the Space Is Noisy-trope.

Even then, it should have a firing sound.