Oolite Bulletins

I have to turn the brightness and contrast up to maximum to be able to see objects when flying about in space. I have been paying for that since last night.

By mid-morning today my sore eyes had become visual disturbances. I had to go lie down in a darkened room this afternoon. I have had a banging headache since lunchtime.

I must be getting old.

It's funny that I'm the one that nags colleagues about taking screen breaks, and now I'm going to bed because my eyes hurt too much to keep them open.

SandJ wrote:

I have to turn the brightness and contrast up to maximum to be able to see objects when flying about in space. I have been paying for that since last night.

By mid-morning today my sore eyes had become visual disturbances. I had to go lie down in a darkened room this afternoon. I have had a banging headache since lunchtime.

I must be getting old.

It's funny that I'm the one that nags colleagues about taking screen breaks, and now I'm going to bed because my eyes hurt too much to keep them open.

When I am looking at most peoples screens, they are a little too bright. And it is rather disturbing for the eyes.

Have a friend that is writing much text on a website. He always makes the background to the site a little greyish. Then it is more pleasant to read it.
You don't get tired so fast. A normal problem on the web. Specially when it comes to texts with a lot of information.

He always says: To come out on the web with information - without making the reader run away or fall asleep - it's a science of itself.

Your problem can be of two different sorts or a combination of both.

The worst is that there may be a problem with your eyes. But then you must be suffering from it in other situations too.
But this is hopefully not the case.

The most common situation is that there is a problem with your screen or your grapic-card or their connections with the software.
In Oolite the graphics is of uttermost importance. And graphics are never easy. For example... there are many graphic-cards.
There are people on this board that knows something about this problem. I don't belong to them.
Am a little surprized that they have not given you some hint.
But maybe they are waiting for the real master to appear.. or they have misunderstood the question.
Well.. I can have done that too..
But I am a talker. I think I started to talk already in my mother's womb. So my big mouth is rarely closed.

Anyway.. when I started to play Oolite I had the same problem. I called a friend, but he had no problem at all.
I visited him and got a schock. Everything was super-clear.
When I came home my screen had started to get a rather beautiful red color. Mostly on the right side.
Tested everything I could get my hands on, but the problem didn't go away.
Then I remembered an old TV that had the same problem because some oxidation on some vital inner parts.

I bought a wide-screen lcd-monitor. After all, my monitor was rather old.
And after that... I was in Heaven.. and still is.

Of course.. it was a little too bright from the start. But these things can rather easily be handled.
And I have not experienced any problem with the graphic of Oolite now.

But maybe something must be changed in the settings in Oolite or your graphic-card.
What do I know?
But there are people that do.

Good Luck!

Hi Sand3,
You didn't mention what type of monitor you are using.
But if you have to have contrast and brightness to the max there is something wrong. If it's an old CRT type monitor it could just be dying a natural death for such things, the screens do burn out eventually, having brightness and contrast at full speeds this up.
You could check in your graphics control on the PC They may be set too low having you compensate with the screens settings.
There is usually a setting for something called gamma. Not a hundred percent sure what it really does. But I found slightly tweaking it up my vision in Oolite became much clearer. That was back when I had a CRT, since killing that I now have an LCD monitor and has been great ever since.
Just wish I could get a large wide screen one now.

I never have white screens either. Found they were really hard on the eyes. Mine are set at a very very pale blue. Makes a huge difference to eye strain.

Ah.. computers, the one you've got is never quite good enough!

After spending a day trying not to look at computer screens, I'm much better.

I always have my screens dimmer than everyone else, and further away - usually at the far edge of my desk. I also configure my default background to be fairly dark, and sometimes will change the background in my word processor to cyan. I have been doing that since I was at college in the late 1980s.

But with Oolite, the game is so dark, and distant ships so faint, turning everything up to the max is necessary to make smaller ships visible at all at 10km, and cargopods visible at 200m.

I am running Oolite on an Eee PC with an external 17" LCD monitor. I am running Ubuntu using the default driver. I played with the gamma settings using xgamma and that helped a bit. But then when not in Oolite, the whole display varies between bright white and pale grey! With the settings back at normal, the PC is perfectly OK and I can work on it all day without any trouble.

But when playing, I was still leaning right forward, to within about 18" of the display and I was aware of the brightness in my peripheral vision when looking away. Trying to spot a distant space station when there was a sun on the screen would make me squint.

Trying to line up the gunsights on a single pixel which is a dark colour, against a black background, with a very bright white section of the screen just a few inches away, is completely against all the good advice for how to use a display screen equipment.

In short, I'm considering uninstalling Oolite for the sake of my eyesight.

You could always take the other DSE advice and use the application for "short bursts" - a single trade between systems - and then go and do something else non-Oolite related...

You could disable shaders to see if this improves it for you. And yes, some ships are quite dark (incl. my own ones) if shaders are used and I think I'll change a few things.

I see 2 possible technical causes :

A. Monitor is to old (17" inch is likely 4+ years)

B. EEE pc graphics chip handles oolite badly

I suggest to try the following :
play oolite on the built-in screen ( 800 x 600 resolution i think)
connect the eee pc to a monitor that does not give you eye porblems
run oolite using the same monitor, but connected to a pc with a dedicated videocard

SandJ, I know exactly what you mean. My question is which ship set are you using? My advice would be:-

Firstly, get the "Farsun" OXP, to reduce the size of the glaring sun.
Secondly, experiment with the sky settings in planetinfo.plist, particularly the ambient light and nebula settings. Brighter or larger nebulas can break up the black background but won't cause the glare that the large sun does.
Thirdly, change your basic ship set to avoid the drab coloured ones. Simon B has an excellent set of ships called the "Waka" series (in two OXPs) on his website, which are mostly cream coloured and much easier to see.

Wildeblood wrote:

SandJ, I know exactly what you mean. My question is which ship set are you using? My advice would be:-

Firstly, get the "Farsun" OXP, to reduce the size of the glaring sun.
Secondly, experiment with the sky settings in planetinfo.plist, particularly the ambient light and nebula settings. Brighter or larger nebulas can break up the black background but won't cause the glare that the large sun does.
Thirdly, change your basic ship set to avoid the drab coloured ones. Simon B has an excellent set of ships called the "Waka" series (in two OXPs) on his website, which are mostly cream coloured and much easier to see.

I second this, and this is actually one of the very few drawbacks of Griff's ship set. While it is truly beautiful, the ships tend to be a little dark. If I'm playing on battery on my laptop for an extended period, I disable griff's all in one and use stock. Probably only happened one or two times during extended train rides. (People tend to look at you with distaste when they see a 40+ year old playing computer games.

I hope I'm not plugging too blatantly here, but many people have commented on how bright and shiny my Smivs'Shipset ships are. So much so, I wonder if I should 'dirty them up' a bit. The justification for the 'new' look is those expensive maintenance overhauls which include re-plating.

Smivs wrote:

I hope I'm not plugging too blatantly here, but many people have commented on how bright and shiny my Smivs'Shipset ships are. So much so, I wonder if I should 'dirty them up' a bit. The justification for the 'new' look is those expensive maintenance overhauls which include re-plating.

Please don't (or if you do, please test with low brightness). It just dawned on me that your ship set is also on my computer, so when I disabled Griff's, I would have been using yours. (It was a while ago, so I'm not sure I remember correctly). I was just trying to extend my battery life by turning down the brightness of my screen.

Svengali wrote:

You could disable shaders to see if this improves it for you.

Turning it on is not an available option anyway.

Lone_Wolf wrote:

I suggest to try the following :
play oolite on the built-in screen ( 800 x 600 resolution i think)

That certainly gives brighter objects than the 17" monitor.

Lone_Wolf wrote:

connect the eee pc to a monitor that does not give you eye problems

I use that monitor all the time without any trouble, except in Oolite.

Wildeblood wrote:

My question is which ship set are you using? My advice would be:-
Firstly, get the "Farsun" OXP, to reduce the size of the glaring sun.

I like that idea. Will do.

Wildeblood wrote:

Secondly, experiment with the sky settings in planetinfo.plist, particularly the ambient light and nebula settings. Brighter or larger nebulas can break up the black background but won't cause the glare that the large sun does.

What nebulae? I have only ever seen them in the images in the 'screenshots' thread.

Wildeblood wrote:

Thirdly, change your basic ship set to avoid the drab coloured ones. Simon B has an excellent set of ships called the "Waka" series (in two OXPs) on his website, which are mostly cream coloured and much easier to see.

That sounds like a good idea too. The Moray Medical Boat, for example, I can only see the blue from its engines. The ship itself is invisible until I get within 1km of it. Ditto for metal plates. I cannot see those until they are right outside the cockpit window.

The netbook is dual boot Ubuntu and XP. So I tried an experiment.

I downloaded and installed Oolite on the XP partition, plus the OXPs and saved games from the Linux partition. So I would be playing in exactly the same universe on both.

On XP, instead of 15-20 FPS, I am getting 50-60 FPS. Wow! What a difference an increase in the FPS makes to the game!

However, it makes no difference to dim objects.

But, the Intel graphics driver config software is available, in which one can play with the gamma, brightness and contrast settings within the graphics components whilst Oolite is running, and then save the settings.

As a consequence, my "play testing" turned into 3 solid hours of playing.

I can now see metal plates, Morays, and so on.

Hurrah!

Great, that means the problem is not in the hardware and can be solved by changing driver settings.

A tip : On-board intel graphics are notorious for being outperformed by the cheap videocard from the '1 for 15, 2 for 20 bucks' bin.
Intel has made progress improving performance though, if you're not using ubuntu 11.04 try upgrading.

I've not see anyone mention.

Are you slightly older than a spring chicken and just maybe you should have your eyes tested.

I was very reluctant to doing that as I always had perfect vision. Till I noticed that street signs were getting harder to read. Well it wasn't me that admited to it. My girl friend pointed it out when asking

"You can't read that!?"

Don't get the wrong impression, screen setting are VERY important.

They make a huge difference on how you see not only your games but all screen work.

I have shaders set at low as I couldn't see the ships. Way too shadded.

My graphics card just isn't up to the job for full shaders. Don't think my screen is either.

I now use magnifier glasses (set by optrician) for anything closer than 40cm and scripts for anything over a few meters. I call them 'readers' the others 'see'ers'.

Oolite comes under 40cm.
What a come down for an electronics tech that could see the smallest to the biggest in the same vision.

I didn't start having sharpness of vision problems till I stopped working with as many tasks out doors as indoors.
The consant changing of focus. The leaves on a tree to the mountains in the distance to the hair on the back of my hand.

There are many eye problems assocciated with having a constant focal range.
Never knew that till I started having it.

Is that just normal for mid..

Scuzz... being attacked and have to wipe the lenzes...