Oolite Bulletins

It would be cool if you could specify in shipdata.plist different textures for the one model, so ships could be personalised, etc. Unfortunately when I thought of that I was thinking that the texture was specified in the plist like models are, then I remembered that they are hardwired into the model. Is there anyway that the texture could be removed from the model without creating a shitload of work? Anyway I just thought it would be a good idea to kick around...

I’m kinda-sorta working on revamping the texturing code. This is on my feature list. Since you ask:

A concept of materials will be introduced. The texture name in a DAT file will be treated as a “material key”. This will be used to look up a material dictionary in the ship’s shipdata entry. If none is found, it will be treated as usual, i.e. the material key will be interpreted as the texture (diffuse map) name. If the dictionary is found, it will be able to specify a potentially wide range of attributes. Initially, the attributes recognised will be texture name, providing the functionality you want, and probably a key specifying whether or not to enable mip-mapping for the texture (default: yes; ignored and treated as no if low detail mode is on).

is this the same thing as Giles' tadalist's "decals for textures"?

No, but it may be a good idea to avoid working past each other. (A decal generally refers to a higher resolution detail being provided by a separate texture, e.g. smacking a logo on the side of a Coriolis.)

FWIW my plan was going to be to render and composite different textures together in a separate OpenGL context before applying them to models.

@Ahruman: Excellent! That would open up quite a few possibilities I would imagine. Good luck with it.