Oolite Bulletins

But oh, for docking/launching sequences like in Amiga Elite! Sorely missed in all remakes, all to often replaced with some concentric rings and a whoo sound. I really miss the sound of the engines powering up as the ship heads for the docking port to depart.

This may get tiring, but there's a lot of atmosphere from the Amiga version that I believe would greatly enhance Oolite. Firstly, the hyperspace sequence. While the greyscale rings can be greatly improved upon, the sound in the Amiga version was sweet as can be. Doubly so for the jump (hyperspeed) engines. Ecm sound was also rather neat, but am not too fussed.

Would be nice if the military laser was dual beam (same overall damage though).

'D' key for dumping cargo. All to easy to press by accident in the default keyboard layout, especially as it's a rarely used function sitting next to regular keys. Left thumb is squished in the corner, rather than splayed out in an asdf form. All too often I have to move my left hand to give commands and have dumped cargo. My first couple of trips in Oolite, I had to start over due to accidentally shooting the station when trying to control speed during docking. I now use my left hand in a different position to be safe when docking.

Mouse support? Many argue that it's very hard to use, and you have to toggle dampening, but once mastered it really is a fun way to fly.

An external view. I see those neat engine trails as I hit hyperspeed, but can't look at my ship in all its glory :-)

Ability to join friendly formations would be handy early in the game for mutual protection, but I guess that's a pipedream :-)

Hi Frantic,

Frantic wrote:

Ability to join friendly formations would be handy early in the game for mutual protection, but I guess that's a pipedream

I think this is in the pipedreamline ;^)

There is mouse support - Shift-M turns mouse mode on. (IIRC, only in full screen mode to avoid having to 'capture' the mouse in Oolite's window in windowed mode).

I agree, a bit of gfx in the docking sequence could do no harm

Frantic wrote:

An external view. I see those neat engine trails as I hit hyperspeed, but can't look at my ship in all its glory

This is being done - halfway there, IIRC. Check out Giles' tada list...

The model is visible in views now, and with some careful placing of the viewpoint in the existing version, the ship can be seen...

The cargo dumping thing is a fairly advanced feature now - all sorts of options go with it, including cycling through the available cargo...

I totally agree with the dock/launch video though. Unfortunately, I think another topic dealt with this negatively. It's a lot of work to create the inside of a docking bay and randomly add ships to it just for the sake of a quick animation on ingress/egress. The Ooniverse is a constant entity even when you are docked, and life goes on outside the station as you do your stuff. When the ship is launched the view switches from docked view to rings then to ship viewpoint. To add a docking bay routine, the bay would need to be modelled (I think), ships would need to be added, then the automatic navigation of the ship would have to start (and be scripted). Then once the rings had been shown, the box and all its subentities/ships would have to be unloaded.

I don't officially know how hard it would be, but it's definitely not a quick job, IMO.

The BBC B disk version did show a picture of the ship in dock after docking, and yes, various versions also had an animated 'leaving-dock' sequence.

The first half of this I'm supposed to be working on this week (head-cold permitting). This will be writing a background-scene constructor kit, allowing ships, billboards etc. to be arranged as the background to the GUI. I'm planning to be quite cunning about this, allowing smart placing of models (to allow for different sized/shaped ships), sub-scenes and random and pseudo-random sub-scenes (imagine piles of containers but with different numbers of barrels and arrangements thereof).

The second part would be to animate this background scene and fly the camera through it to show the undocking sequence. That may be a bit harder.

aegidian wrote:

(head-cold permitting).

It seems to be going around. I spent half the night on the weekend waiting for my sinuses to explode. Sudafed fixed that, then I had the cold sweats. Joy all around My next door neighbour had the same but she's pregnant so couldn't even seek a Sudafed release.

Is there already part of the code in place?

Because, often, after exiting the station, I see a fleeting image of tail-exhaust... And it looks like the tail exhaust from my own ship myself only thing is, this is the exhaust, in forward view (1.64OSX, on a crappy G3@350MHz, avg. 4-6 fps near station when there's more than one other ship around)

Rxke wrote:

Because, often, after exiting the station, I see a fleeting image of tail-exhaust... And it looks like the tail exhaust from my own ship myself only thing is, this is the exhaust, in forward view (1.64OSX, on a crappy G3@350MHz, avg. 4-6 fps near station when there's more than one other ship around)

Nah, that's a bug in my trail-saving exhaust code. I really ought to fix it (by faking an exhaust trail at launch).

Giles: just in case you weren’t aware of it, the fancy way to transition between an indoor and outdoor scene is a “portal”. This is a one-sided polgon bounding the transition to indoorsness; if it is within the viewing area, facing towards the player and not ridiculously small, the indoor stuff is worth drawing. Otherwise, don’t bother. (A full indoor portal engine probably won’t be worthwhile, but a portal for the entrance hole would be.)

I know about portals, ta. Adding them to the game engine just for the one transition would be overkill. Besides it would bring into question elements of scale again, yuk.

An elevator/dockingback/prep for launch sequence could still end with the mem-somn breakpattern for the transition to open-space and still look good.

Yay!

Hands up for Battlestar Galactica (Orig. Series*) Whooosh exits from Stations.


* Of how many shows can you say it got worse AFTER Dirk Benedict left...?

Selezen wrote:

The model is visible in views now, and with some careful placing of the viewpoint in the existing version, the ship can be seen...

would it work if you set your -say- aft view to a viewpoint outside the ship? I front of it, I mean, so you'd have some kind of chasing cam effect (except that the ship would chase the cam)

Yep - that would work. The fact that the player model is being rendered at all times means that you can place your viewpoint anywhere you like and should be able to see your ship if your viewing angle is correct.

For example, set your forward view to say 20m behind the ship and maybe 10m above it and you should be able to see the ship directly in front of your viewpoint at the bottom of the screen - a chase cam view.

Similarly, if you want to see an angle from in front of the ship when looking aft, set the aft view 20m in front of the ship.

The Llama shows this effect even when the view are correct, as the forward vanes are visible. The new version of the Eagle Mk 2 shows the rear hull in the rear view, and each wing is visible in the side views.

Ooh, nice!

So it should be easy as to implement, say ctrl-or shift-F1,2,3,4 in-flight to switch to corresponding outside views, if those were supplied in a plist somewhere?

hint, hint