Oolite Bulletins

I have removed my old Oolite installation, installed 1.80 and started from scratch.

Congrats to the team. 1.80 is excellent but there is a feature that is really spoiling the game for me. This is Solar Glare. The Glare Filter addon does not work for me - at all!

It is that bad that when sun-skimming I sometimes cannot distinguish the sun from the glare and can actually be heading away from the sun without noticing unless I look at the compass. Scooping cargo against the glare is a complete no-no and even the neat little addon that highlights cargo doesn't work against the glare.

I have found references to a sun glare filter property in plists but cannot find it. Could somebody please tell me whether this has in fact been implemented and, if so, where it is.

Thanks in advance.

It's odd that the filter is not working for you.

Obvious question out of the way first: You did turn it on, yes?
The filter is primable; N to select, n to turn on/off, b to select low/med/high.

As I recall, the glare filter has to be bought too - and it degrades with use.

davcefai wrote:

...but there is a feature that is really spoiling the game for me. This is Solar Glare..

I have to agree. I didn't say anything before now as I thought I'd get used to it over time, but I haven't. Sorry, but I just don't like this feature at all.

AHA! Thanks.

I was priming it, using b but had not pressed n to turn it on. Works now.

However it is still a PITA. When I have glare on screen I cannot even read the shift-n status messages, which are in yellow.

So back to my original question: is there a variable somewhere that I can tweak? As somebody remarked, in an ooniverse where you can travel in hyperspace, surely solar glare should not be a problem!

davcefai wrote:

is there a variable somewhere that I can tweak?

I'm sure there is a much more elegant and permanent way to do this, but this hack should get the job done:

– In the Config folder of the filter OXZ, find and open the script.js file.
– Normally, the filter burns out after 2 minutes on the highest setting.
– Line 13 has the duration; Changing 144 to 1440 will give you 20 minutes, 14400 200 minutes, and so on.
– If filter levels [0.2; 0.4; 0.6] are too weak for your liking, they can be increased in line 23. I believe 1.0 is max. I've not tested this.
– Lines 51 and 52 turn filter off when docked or in witchspace. Comment out with // to disable this function. (Also untested.)

I'll add a micro-oxp that kills the glare to the OXZ manager later tonight. Look in the mechanics category. I'll add Untrumbled too, because I thought I already had, and there aren't enough OXPs with names that start with U.

However, if you're one of the 1000+ who've downloaded Distant Suns (gloatedy-gloat-gloat-brag) consider that might be the culprit for the frustrating sun-skimming experience. It sets a lot of coronas to a huge size and, because of the way drawing coronas has changed in core Oolite, they are a lot more obtrusive now than when I created it.

Edit: It seems Lone Wolf might have misread culprit as solution, so I'm back to add emphasis.

I had the same problem with core, solved it by installing [wiki]Sensible_Sun[/wiki] .
It places the sun further away, reducing the glare effect a lot.
Offcourse sunskimming now takes more time...

While searching for a solution i also noticed distant suns, but felt it was a bit to intrusive.

Lone_Wolf wrote:

I had the same problem with core, solved it by installing [wiki]Sensible_Sun[/wiki]

I simply added a sun_distance_modifier value to my personal planetinfo.plist - far distant suns are cool!
Not that I have a problem with the solar glare - one soon gets used to it!

I've got Distant Suns and often skim for fuel but I think that the flare effect is realistic, I have no problems with it regarding the lack of external visibility. Having said that, I wouldn't say no to a more expensive filter that doesn't wear out in normal use - it could still be vulnerable to battle damage. of course.

But inability to read internal messages etc. against a bright background is something that I'm sure would have been thought of in any real HUD design, especially during something as critical as skimming. It's silly that I can't read messages about drive status etc. close to the sun.

ffutures wrote:

I've got Distant Suns and often skim for fuel but I think that the flare effect is realistic, I have no problems with it regarding the lack of external visibility. Having said that, I wouldn't say no to a more expensive filter that doesn't wear out in normal use - it could still be vulnerable to battle damage. of course.

Easy to do of course, but I respected the core feature so much that I at the time chose to make the filter dirt cheap with a short life span. That way you can get the filter early in the game and have to ration it and at the same time the core feature is always there, reminding how useful the filter is. I tested with a lot of different settings and noticed that very quicky one comes accustomed to the filtering level. For example with 50% filter that is always on you soon forget it even is there. I wanted the filter to be more involving requiring you to constantly operate it. Personal choice naturally.

ffutures wrote:

But inability to read internal messages etc. against a bright background is something that I'm sure would have been thought of in any real HUD design, especially during something as critical as skimming. It's silly that I can't read messages about drive status etc. close to the sun.

Now we're talking. A HUD that allows you to see the gauges while being blinded by the sun glare would be real nice. Maybe some of the the HUD elements/texts could have black/dark borders so they would be readable when the background is very bright.

spara wrote:

A HUD that allows you to see the gauges while being blinded by the sun glare would be real nice.

An opaque instrument panel type of hud - such as Fighter Hud - does that.

Cody wrote:

spara wrote:

A HUD that allows you to see the gauges while being blinded by the sun glare would be real nice.

An opaque instrument panel type of hud - such as Fighter Hud - does that.

It does indeed. For those of us that want to use something close to the default hud, a partially obscuring, primable sunscreen might be in order...

Cmdr Wyvern's MilHUD had smoked glass behind the important displays for just this reason. Useful even back in the 1.76 days.

There are two types of white-out effect generated by the sun.
1) Glare: this is generated by looking at the sun from anything but extreme range (though is more intense close up). It can be reduced or eliminated by setting the sun_glare_filter property in shipdata, or the sunGlareFilter ship property in Javascript. 0 is no filter, 1 is full filter.

2) Fog: this is the hot gases near the sun surface. This is not filterable but only occurs close to the sun. It should still be possible to tell the difference between "sun" and "not sun" when at sun-skimming depth without a compass, though you might still need to do a bit of instrument-flying if the star has a particularly large corona.

How about a glare filter that works for a longer period in normal use, but needs to be replaced more rapidly if you do a lot of sun-skimming? Would that be possible?