Oolite Bulletins

There are a bunch of "retexture" OXPs in the manager, but a fair number of them are pretty old, which suggests they're pre-1.88. Has anyone put together a list of which "stage" of Oolite these various retextures are from? Some of them appear to override defaults that are more recent, which means they're technically "downgrades" if what you're trying to do is get the fanciest looking game. (To be sure, some players may want the most retro looking game, and so will use those overrides on purpose.)

More specifically, I'm curious about all the "griff" retextures. Those seem to be from around or before 2015. They're excellent work but are some of them, strictly speaking, out of date?

=== In a nutshell ===
2004 '''v1.00''' - Oolite first version - for Mac only (Aegidian)
2006 '''v1.65''' - first stable version, linux & windows versions come out, Aegidian steps down
2011 '''v1.76''' - Ahruman's ''mythical next release''
2014 '''v1.80''' - Cim's first radical version with structured consultation - many OXPs fall by the wayside. OXZs & Expansions Manager introduced. ''E:D released''
2015 '''v1.82''' - Cim's second radical version with structured consultation. Cim steps down.
2020 '''v1.90''' - current version

The major graphics improvements were shaders which came in back with Ahruman (1.76 & 1.77 were his two stable releases, but his shaders came in earlier than that). And then a_c_'s back-breaking work from 1.84 through to 1.90: planets & atmospheres, ships & specular mapping etc. There is much more to be said, but I don't understand it... His work does look super on my AppleMac, though.

Cim's work broke some of the older oxp's - or made them impossibly tough. The AI's were rejigged to be tougher, and when this was added to the über-ships (with super weapons & armour) which was the old way of making them tougher... well, you can guess! There were also rejigs to the ways that the markets worked, which broke some markets / market based .oxps (such as Switeck's, if you have noticed his recent posts). Some of the broken oxp's were fixed, but not all.

But most stuff is still backwards compatible. Galactic Navy (with it's updates) seems to work fine - markets and all. Some of the old textures look cronky, but again, the oxp's still work! The choice of oxp's is so large, that if you don't die of old age before you work it all out, you can choose your extra ships and stations just based on aesthetics.

See here for details on a_c_'s work.

You can scroll back a_c_'s earlier versions (1.88, 1.86, 1.84). Cim was finished off by the witchspace lobster after he finished off 1.82.

If you try the older versions, you will find that the stations rotate a darn sight faster in 1.77 and earlier!

all the 'griff as author' ship stuff will run in modern oolite OK, but they don't include any of the lovely new lighting effects added into Oolite's default code - the griff stuff still has sun lighting and stuff on ships but it's just not as polished as the sun lighting in default oolite so they are out of date in that respect - the griff stuff does have some extra 'special effects' not in the default game though, coloured hull lights, engine glows that react to ship speed etc, most of it is just extra graphics card busywork though and easily missable in game unless you're getting quite close to ships and stuff

Griff wrote: ↑Fri Dec 03, 2021 9:41 am

all the 'griff as author' ship stuff will run in modern oolite OK, but they don't include any of the lovely new lighting effects added into Oolite's default code - the griff stuff still has sun lighting and stuff on ships but it's just not as polished as the sun lighting in default oolite so they are out of date in that respect - the griff stuff does have some extra 'special effects' not in the default game though, coloured hull lights, engine glows that react to ship speed etc, most of it is just extra graphics card busywork though and easily missable in game unless you're getting quite close to ships and stuff

Thanks for the detail!