Oolite Bulletins

Hi,

I have made a version of the old Cobra MK3. Would like some opinions if it's worth trying to make it suitable for Oolite.
The original model was made in Sketchup, but it converts fine in OBJ and dat, but can't really verify how the dat file.

http://pre13.deviantart.net/1fe7/th/pre ... a4p94v.jpg

http://pre08.deviantart.net/bf3b/th/pre ... a4qw38.jpg

http://pre00.deviantart.net/ff1d/th/pre ... a4xwfk.jpg

http://orig00.deviantart.net/62d2/f/201 ... a505ts.jpg

http://orig08.deviantart.net/4634/f/201 ... a505tz.jpg

I'm no modeller, but your Cobra Mk III looks awesome! Definitely worth getting it into the game! Sorry I can't give you any directions, but I'm sure some of our other avid modellers will be along shortly to provide any assistance.

Welcome Marian87!

There are converters between Wavefront .obj and Oolite .dat files and some info about usage in the wiki. To appear in the game you need other files like shipdata.plist, you can take over a small ship oxp and replace the dat and png files within. Even simpler if you share the files you have and ask for help here.

Thank you guys.

Ok, here are the files I have now. https://www.dropbox.com/s/lyer37w322b9i ... 4.rar?dl=0
The mesh needs to be simplified and the texture is a 2048 px square.

I'll try the file swap and see what I get.

So the model appears to have exported well and it doesn't seem to have any missing geometry, but I can't seem to get the texture to work even though I renamed it and edited the location in the files in notepad.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pcqkmrdesx498 ... 4.png?dl=0

If you replace the texture in 183899. line in your .dat to kobr4_diffuse.png (without path) and put this file into Textures subfolder within an .oxp folder in AddOns (and hold down shift until the spinning cobra appear) then should work. If not then maybe the materials part in your shipdata.plist set another texture in diffuse_map.

Marian87 wrote:

...and edited ... in notepad.

Avoid Notepad for all things Oolite. It adds unwanted and un-necessary characters to code which can break things!
There are plenty of good free text editors available. I personally use gedit but I know Notepad++ is very popular around here and may be a good choice for you.
On another note, be aware that both mac and Linux computers are case-sensitive (as are many aspects of Oolite). OXPs developed on Windows often fail because of case-sensitive issues.
For example a texture file named Mytexture.png entered in shipdata as mytexture.png won't work.
Good luck with this project - looks nice

Lol, ok. Thanks for the advice. I've installed notepad++

Now lets see if I can get the pesky textures working.

Norby wrote:

If you replace the texture in 183899. line in your .dat to kobr4_diffuse.png (without path) and put this file into Textures subfolder within an .oxp folder in AddOns (and hold down shift until the spinning cobra appear) then should work. If not then maybe the materials part in your shipdata.plist set another texture in diffuse_map.

Thanks, that worked.https://www.dropbox.com/s/65oe97qen86o7lr/kob.png?dl=0

Now to simplify the geometry

Alrighty, I simplified the geometry and components and modified the texture a bit. It works in the ship viewer.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/lyer37w322b9i ... 4.rar?dl=0

What's the next step?

I want this ship to be comparable to the Cobra MkIII, but slightly better in some areas and slightly worse in others.

Marian87 wrote:

What's the next step?

You will need to add all the other elements and compile the OXP for development and testing.
Make a containing folder (called KOB R4.oxp) and then into this add the other folders. The minimum you will need is three, Config, Models and Textures.
Config will contain the shipdata.plist and shipyard.plist. You can also add shiplibrary.plist and descriptions.plist for the ship display.
Models will contain the model (.dat) file. You won't need the .obj or .mtl files for this.
Textures should contain the texture image file (.png).
This is the bare basics but will get the ship in-game and working. Just place the .oxp container in your AddOns folder. This should allow yo to start using the ship and to change and tweak things as you develop it further - remember to hold down the 'Shift' key when starting the game to clear the cache after each change.

Add a license (for example CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0) into readme.txt, also the link of this topic and all of your thoughts. Even your current rar package should contain a license, this is not optional.

Read [wiki]OXP howto Game Balance[/wiki] and setup your plists.

If you would like that your package appear in the in-game expansion manager then do the steps in The All-in-One Guide to OXZ Packaging and Distribution.

Thanks. That will take some time.

This looks awesome!
I dont know if it is intentional but maybe you could change the red and green lights because at least on earth its common to have red lights left and green lights right. However one more time this looks impressiv.

nice! looking forward to it.