Oolite Bulletins

For anyone who's into a more individual look of the player cobra, I cludged together: OCPC - OCPC - Custom Paintscheme Creation

It's basically a help to make skinning the new default player ship and maybe share it with others a bit easier. I splitted the default RGBA files into two now: an emission.png for lighting effects and a diffuse map for the texture of the ship. So it should now be possible to edit a skin with anything that handles PNG files. However, the default skin package contains some GIMP templates and a basic howto for more complex skins to get you started.


Installation:
A working OCPC consists of basically two files, the base package and only one(!) skin package.
Installing more than one skin package per ship at a time is not advised. Removing the base package and leaving the skin is not advised either.
if you like your cobra to change it's skin, just remove the installed skin package and put the new skin oxp in place.


The base oxp and following skin.oxps are currently available on the box account:



Default Griff, Clean and Colonial Red.

hope you like it,

Not in a position to check this our right now but looks interesting...

Those samples look great

Thanks a lot Redspear. I thought it a nice feature.

As a POC I expanded the base package to support skinning the Adder. You can install the skin for the cobra3 and the one for the adder at the same time. There are some example skins online for it to test:


Griff Default, clean and Blackadder

Actually it wasn't such a cunning plan to use the acronym with the cobra3 in it... Now supporting more shiptypes than just the cobbie it's rather OCPS instead OCPC, but I leave it for backwards compatibility. All I have to come up with is a smart idea for the second "c"... cludge, creation... oh well...

have fun,

Amah
(*Sings silently* ...beware the deadly flashing beam, unless you want to end up shorter, Black Adder, Black Adder - he flies a pitch black shiiiip...)

/e: uploaded a clean paintscheme as 3rd example. Btw. should the adder have 5tons via cargobay extension or better leave everything like in the core game?

Thanks for sharing this Amah. I'll have a play around this afternoon when I get home from work.

If you like, post a screenshot. It should be easy to support other ship types as well. I f you find bugs or have suggestions just say a word

My main concern is being able to get access to my PC. My wife has buried my PC desk with Christmas decoration boxes and mountains of non-functioning fairy lights.

Might be a slight hint in it

Imaginos wrote:

...and mountains of non-functioning fairy lights.

I'll bet they were all working fine when you put them away last year...

Looks interesting!

I might use this method to do a reskin for my Anaconda - where can I find the base diffuse texture to play with? I had a look in the code game Texture folder, but can only see the 'strict/classic' ones and not the standard Griff v1.80 textures.

The 'new' textures are in the Textures folder - the Anaconda has two files, 'oolite_anaconda_diffuse.png' and 'oolite_anaconda_subents.png'. The 'problem' with these as you will see is that they have an emission map burnt into the alpha channel which gives them a ghostly appearance. This means that as they come they are not customisable. There is a complex method (detailed here on the board somewhere I think) which allows users to decrypt them to a useable form, but you can no longer just open the image in a graphics program and 're-paint' them.
This is an interesting point, and does touch on my current project, the Classic Ships OXZ, which will not have this problem for the high resolution set, but would for the Lite set as things stand, so I have asked for some feedback over on the Classic Ships thread here.

Hej Smivs, hej Ranthe,

yeah I tried to post a quick and dirty guide (based on Captain Solo's instruction and my experiences from the noshaders project) in the skinner's den, but you need some experience with e.g. GIMP and RGBAs , so I thought I come up with this pet project, to make customising easier.
FYI: Concerning the oolite textures you basically extract each colour channel plus alpha, export the alpha as emission map and recombine RGB as diffuse texture.

I updated the ocpc base package to support anacondas now, and uploaded two example skins for it: The default griff anaconda and a whitish/slate coloured paintscheme Griff used for his later ships.




There's a texture_template folder in the skin packages, where you can find the diffuse and emission textures as layered GIMP RGB example files. The diffuse and emission textures also come as plain PNG files, so if you don't like Gimp you can edit them even in Paint I think

I have to admit I just nicked the mask for colour schemes from dertien's YAH Haulers anaconda templates (thanks for putting them online! ), which you can find here: https://app.box.com/s/46n9jxe50x7pwzm27qtk/1/2113007684

if you have ideas, questions or find bugs just say a word. If you like, do post a screenshot of your finished ship,
have fun,

Thanks Amah

Good job

That's some amazing work!

merci Globule, thanks zireael,

something more to play around. Updated the ocpc-base to support Cobra Mk1s now and uploaded a griff default texture example:



Again, colour layers and a texture mask based on Dertien's work from his Cobra Mk1 Variety pack are included. So, big thanks for his efforts.

have fun,

Amah wrote:

Hej Smivs, hej Ranthe,

yeah I tried to post a quick and dirty guide (based on Captain Solo's instruction and my experiences from the noshaders project) in the skinner's den, but you need some experience with e.g. GIMP and RGBAs , so I thought I come up with this pet project, to make customising easier.
FYI: Concerning the oolite textures you basically extract each colour channel plus alpha, export the alpha as emission map and recombine RGB as diffuse texture.

I updated the ocpc base package to support anacondas now, and uploaded two example skins for it: The default griff anaconda and a whitish/slate coloured paintscheme Griff used for his later ships.

Many thanks Amah!

Here's my first cut at dressing a Griff Atomic Annie with OCPC:


And here's a work-in-progress of my adapting the Medical Anaconda to the Griff 1.80 models: