Oolite Bulletins

Sun glare is a cool, but really annoying effect. Especially when one tries to play as a miner and asteroids are often found on the planet sun route. So I have a suggestion. Could the "External Heat Equipment" have some sort of filter that would either remove the glare or at least diminish it considerably?

Glare had been tested also for sun-skiming and to be honest I didn't think that it was that bad. I guess personal taste plays quite a big role in this case. It is meant to give some hassle (not too much though), but I think that the best solution here would be to make it a per-system settable option via planetinfo.plist and also controllable by JS by use of a multiplier factor - I am thinking 0.0 to 1.0 here so that it can only be set to lower, not higher values than what normally is.

Hoping that I will get the opportunity, I will try to give this a go in the next few days. Will report back.

Edit: On second thought, having this as a system setting will probably affect AI behaviour. NPCs are also affected by sun glare so making it system-wide settable would reduce it for all, not just the player. Maybe a better thing would be a ship property like sunGlareFilterMultiplier or similar, so that it can be set on a per-ship rather than on a per-system basis. I'll try to think a bit more about it.

Most definitely it's a personal thing. Thanks for taking a look at it. Is this really what it should be looking like or is it my system or maybe some oxp glitch?

One could easily imagine that in the era of space travel and sun skimming, there would be some sort of glare filters .

I don't find the glare all that annoying. Moving the sun much further away helps. I have sun_distance_modifier set to 65. Seems more natural. That and ambient lighting set to 0.

<nods> What Solo said! I have sun_distance_modifier = 100; (which does make for long sunward cruises, but looks much better).
Even when skimming though, I don't find the glare too annoying - but it is a personal taste thing.

If the sun is far far away, then it's ok. I'm using distant suns and on systems where it's far it won't annoy at all. Then again, I don't usually don't visit the sun in those systems. _But_ in the core game the sun is quite close and this is a core feature. And as such the effect should be thought out without moving the sun. Unless the sun position in the core is to be moved further.

spara wrote:

Unless the sun position in the core is to be moved further.

Little chance of that, I'd think - few people have the patience to skim, or visit rock hermits, at those distances.

another_commander wrote:

Edit: On second thought, having this as a system setting will probably affect AI behaviour. NPCs are also affected by sun glare so making it system-wide settable would reduce it for all, not just the player. Maybe a better thing would be a ship property like sunGlareFilterMultiplier or similar, so that it can be set on a per-ship rather than on a per-system basis. I'll try to think a bit more about it.

I think affecting NPCs equally is probably okay. The effect there is relatively subtle most of the time, and it only seems fair that if the player isn't that affected by it neither are they. planetinfo would certainly be the quick way to do it, and an easy one for OXPs to customise.

spara wrote:

_But_ in the core game the sun is quite close and this is a core feature. And as such the effect should be thought out without moving the sun. Unless the sun position in the core is to be moved further.

I think the size of the effect is probably about right for the angular size of the sun - and I don't personally think it's excessive with normal sun distances, though an OXPable parameter to let people adjust to taste sounds a very good idea.

That the sun in core is far too close is a separate problem and one that's not going to be fixed soon. It's essentially a symptom of the repeatedly-discussed "the current torus implementation is flawed" problem, which I think is now theoretically solvable with the new AIs, but I don't think it can be done in practice under current constraints.

cim wrote:

another_commander wrote:

Edit: On second thought, having this as a system setting will probably affect AI behaviour. NPCs are also affected by sun glare so making it system-wide settable would reduce it for all, not just the player. Maybe a better thing would be a ship property like sunGlareFilterMultiplier or similar, so that it can be set on a per-ship rather than on a per-system basis. I'll try to think a bit more about it.

I think affecting NPCs equally is probably okay. The effect there is relatively subtle most of the time, and it only seems fair that if the player isn't that affected by it neither are they. planetinfo would certainly be the quick way to do it, and an easy one for OXPs to customise.

Still, I think that a per-ship setting, possibly in addition to a planetinfo one would not be a bad idea, as it would create possibilities for new equipment and individual adjustments. Defaults would of course be what we currently have. I actually had most of the code already written before reading your post, so I think I'll just finish off the per-ship implementation and see how a per-system one can be added. At the end of the day, if we are not happy with either for whatever reason, we can always remove it.

In commit 08e6627, the shipdata plist sun_glare_filter and the Ship class JS sunGlareFilter properties have been implemented. You will have them in the next nightly build.

The sun glare filter is set on a per-ship basis and is represented by a number between 0.0 and 1.0. Zero means no filter at all (i.e. you get the full sun glare as it is now) and is the default value, while a value of one means full glare filter, which basically suppresses sun glare completely. Shipdata glare filter values out of the 0.0- 1.0 range are ignored and the value assigned becomes either 0 or 1, depending on which side of the boundary we fall out of.

Feel free to test and let us know if this is OK. The fact that you can now control glare via JS gives room for equipment like Glare Filters etc.

next dock buy your ship a pair of sunglasses from the market..... I can see a Glare_filter.OXZ in the making here....

low tech level has poor filters to 0.2 and scale from there to get a full 1 size filter you need to get to the highest tech level stations.....

you could get a decal to put across the top of the cockpit... Ookley- Thermonuclear Protection.... lol

or maybe ... RooBan... ?

Thank you very much. This is excellent . It's working just the way I asked. Here's an image showing a 50% glare filter compared to a 0% filter:


I'll be posting an oxz soon bundling the filter to the heat shielding as I originally visioned.

CaptSolo wrote:

Moving the sun much further away helps. I have sun_distance_modifier set to 65. Seems more natural.

Yes, I think so too. And there are some OXP to place the sun further. For example: Distant Suns - in this OXP places of suns depend of star classes. So, using Distant Suns OXP, I removed Farsun OXP & Sensible Sun OXP.

spud42 wrote:

next dock buy your ship a pair of sunglasses from the market..... I can see a Glare_filter.OXZ in the making here....

low tech level has poor filters to 0.2 and scale from there to get a full 1 size filter you need to get to the highest tech level stations.....

you could get a decal to put across the top of the cockpit... Ookley- Thermonuclear Protection.... lol

or maybe ... RooBan... ?

I can definitely see it coming, too.

yep i remember them from the 90's all those stickers across the back windows of cars...

thought everyone was ignoring this post as too cheesy... lol