Oolite Bulletins

Ahruman wrote:

Frame wrote:

The lasers though seems out of place now though...

’s on my infamous “to do… later” list.

ah yes,,, forgot, and where is my manners..

Welcome Back

Diziet Sma wrote:

@ Ahruman, how do you get links to work in your YouTube comments? Every time I've tried, it just displays as text...

URLs are automatically linkified in video descriptions, but not in comments.

Ahh.. I did mean description.. so, my mistake was trying to put tags around the link.. thanks!

Has been decided yet if Griff's amazing work will be the default ships in 1.73?

And are we going to be seeing both these types of Thargoid warship Griff has done? I love both but I have a very small preference to the slightly more alien looking first version, although I'd be happy with either!

I can't wait!

It has been suggested (ok, I suggested) that both be present - but they should be different factions if somebody would be kind enough to build a Thargoid Civil War OXP (although how this would fit in with Selezen's Elite OO/Universe's timeline I don't know).

And while I'd love to see Griff's set as the base set I can think of several reasons why they probably shouldn't. 1) Not every machine has shaders 1b) not every machine could handle the new ships very well and at the end of the day Oolite should be available to everyone initially its up to them what they do after that 2) Should Griff be given precedence over either Aegidian's original ships or Simon B's excellent almost full set? 3) What do people who want to play in strict mode do? 4) Size of download?

I would suggest if desired and/or technically possible that the original ships, Griff's ships and Simon Bs ships are somehow embedded as tick box options in the options screen/menu so they can be selected in any combination of 1, 2 or all three sets appearing in-game. However, more likely and possibly sensibly is that they're simply included as ready to go OXPs that come with the main pack - but then how do we have a fair and even distribution of the old, Griff and Simon B ships if each one is designed to replace the old ship models?

dalek501 wrote:

Has been decided yet if Griff's amazing work will be the default ships in 1.73?

The definitely won’t be. The most important reason – the one that makes it an absolute, definite no – is that they’re currently only a small subset of the ships. For a replacement to be a real option, we would need a complete, consistent replacement set.

1) Not every machine has shaders

This, however, is not a factor. It is entirely possible for a ship to work with no shaders, low-complexity shaders and full shaders.

Ahruman wrote:

dalek501 wrote:

Has been decided yet if Griff's amazing work will be the default ships in 1.73?

The definitely won’t be. The most important reason – the one that makes it an absolute, definite no – is that they’re currently only a small subset of the ships. For a replacement to be a real option, we would need a complete, consistent replacement set.

1) Not every machine has shaders

This, however, is not a factor. It is entirely possible for a ship to work with no shaders, low-complexity shaders and full shaders.

This I know - but what I meant was Griff's ship are best viewed with shaders on - seems sad to have them in the game but not have them with shaders - btw, what's the difference (for Griff's ships for example) between simple and full shaders?

in simple shader mode you'd only see the fresnel (the extra colours being mixed into the texture depending on the viewing angle) & the ramped up 'shinyness' effects.
Missing effects would be the bump map, the colour variations and all the glows and scrolling lights and stuff.
They'd probably be quite dark and hard to spot and would look like one of the thargoids hadn't closed the door properly overnight and now the interior light had made the battery go flat.

Griff wrote:

in simple shader mode you'd only see the fresnel (the extra colours being mixed into the texture depending on the viewing angle) & the ramped up 'shinyness' effects.
Missing effects would be the bump map, the colour variations and all the glows and scrolling lights and stuff.
They'd probably be quite dark and hard to spot and would look like one of the thargoids hadn't closed the door properly overnight and now the interior light had made the battery go flat.

full shaders it is then come 1.73 (or whatever it'll be called by then).

Griff wrote:

They'd probably be quite dark and hard to spot and would look like one of the thargoids hadn't closed the door properly overnight and now the interior light had made the battery go flat.

Oi, we have a little bingly buzzer thing that goes beep if we do that

On the shader subject, I can confirm as a non-shader user that ships written with shaders do still work on a machine that cannot run them. They just don't look as good as they would with shaders (but they still look pretty good!). I've never seen Griff's space bar in its full glory, but it still looks mighty fine on a non-shader machine. So You can generally play Oolite with shader OXPs even if your machine cannot run them, you just don't get the full effect.

For native ships, personally I tweeked my oxps to set the Dream Team as defualt (for the ones done), Ramon's Cobra II and Annaconda, Griffs Boa and Krait and SimonBs for the rest as my replacement set.

Given the number of replacement sets available though, it might be handy to release a "total replacement" and "alternatives" versions of the OXP by tweeking shipdata. Personally I like having a variety of different takes on the ships encountered and the only trouble with different OXPs replacing the whole set is that if (like me) you'd rather like not knowing whether the next cobra you meet will be a standard, Ramon, Snug / Griff version is you have to change shipdata to allow all takes on the ship to be added to the pool. I know its easy to do, but casual users often won't and thus miss out.

LittleBear wrote:

On the shader subject, I can confirm as a non-shader user that ships written with shaders do still work on a machine that cannot run them. They just don't look as good as they would with shaders (but they still look pretty good!). I've never seen Griff's space bar in its full glory, but it still looks mighty fine on a non-shader machine. So You can generally play Oolite with shader OXPs even if your machine cannot run them, you just don't get the full effect.

For native ships, personally I tweeked my oxps to set the Dream Team as defualt (for the ones done), Ramon's Cobra II and Annaconda, Griffs Boa and Krait and SimonBs for the rest as my replacement set.

Given the number of replacement sets available though, it might be handy to release a "total replacement" and "alternatives" versions of the OXP by tweeking shipdata. Personally I like having a variety of different takes on the ships encountered and the only trouble with different OXPs replacing the whole set is that if (like me) you'd rather like not knowing whether the next cobra you meet will be a standard, Ramon, Snug / Griff version is you have to change shipdata to allow all takes on the ship to be added to the pool. I know its easy to do, but casual users often won't and thus miss out.

Am I being dense? Is it easy to do? I want all the ships - original - Simon B's and Griff's...

If you decide that you want SimonB's (say) as the default, but also have (say) sung's textures installed then you just need to go through the shipdata for sungs textures adding (say) "sung_alt_" to the <key> name of each ship. That way Ooolite now has two versions of each ship, so when a cobra III (say) appears its a 50 / 50 which version appears. Any OXP with the same <key> name replaces the original (and also replaces any OXP version installed if it is alphabeticaly higher by OXP name). But any ship with a different key name adds to the pool rather than replacing. If you have numerous total replacements installed but change the key name, then you get different sorts of the same ship appearing in game rather than just one type. That is the only downside really with different writers doing total replacements. If lots of differnt writers all do a total replacement then you can only have one type of each ship appearing. But if different writers use different key names then you get a variety to each ship. Lots of writers have done different versions of the asp for example. But it's kinda cool to have all the different versions of the asp appear rather than them all being the same.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

It has been suggested (ok, I suggested) that both be present - but they should be different factions if somebody would be kind enough to build a Thargoid Civil War OXP (although how this would fit in with Selezen's Elite OO/Universe's timeline I don't know).

The timeline doesn't really go into any civilisation other than GalCop. It only touches the other civilisations in their relationships with GalCop, so fill yer boots!

As far as the question about replacing the default ships, why not have all the base ship replacements in there, working alongside each other? Griff's set, the Neolites and maybe even the humble (and outclassed) Dream Team can all be added to the default folders and let Oolite choose between them.

Just a thought. <sinks back into the depths>

DaddyHoggy wrote:

It has been suggested (ok, I suggested) that both be present - but they should be different factions if somebody would be kind enough to build a Thargoid Civil War OXP (although how this would fit in with Selezen's Elite OO/Universe's timeline I don't know).

Maybe we could have a Doctor Who/Daleks situation... like the "Cult of Skaro". Maybe a section of the Thargoids wanted better ways to defeat humans, and so started to become them to think like them. Leading them to develop these new more human style ships? Meanwhile the original more alien Thargoids disliked this, thinking the race should be pure, and a civil war was started? These Thargoids still fly the more alien looking ships?