Oolite Bulletins

Here's a little nitpicky thing:

How does everyone feel about the image of the planet that comes up on the planet info screens now in 1.65? Sure, it looks nice, but it adds a slight delay in the screen coming up, whereas it used to come up instantaneously upon hitting the button. I don't know that the planet image is worth it, as it causes this "hiccup" and adds no useful info to the screen.

Like I said, this is a nitpick. I really like the game, and appreciate all the work that Giles and others have done on it!

The slight delay is certainly a small negative point - I wonder if the image could be added after the screen itself has come up, so that even if it appeared with a short delay, it would not affect the usability of the screen?

On the other hand, once we get some "prettier" planets in Oolite, I bet this screen will look very good with the pic in it!

i do remeber this function being useful once - when there was a game glitch and my screen told me the name of the planet was one thing, but the picture told me that i certainly was not at the planet i thought i was.

on second thoughts, i'm still not sure how useful that was...

...but i still think the picture looks nice

Planet Picture? We talking about the rotating planet? That has been there longer than 1.65...

Wolfwood wrote:

I wonder if the image could be added after the screen itself has come up, so that even if it appeared with a short delay, it would not affect the usability of the screen?

And if a green wireframe sphere was used as a placeholder image (for the second before the pretty planet was displayed), it would look really nice.

that would be handsome if it would match the final planet, but maybe not so easy considering the planets come in different sizes.

Hmmm, if it was a true wireframe image then it could match any size. Maybe have an option for wireframe/solid planets.

The goal would be to get a placeholder image onscreen quickly, so just a bitmap scaled to the right size should do the job quickest and with minimal work.

The visual effect of a wireframe replaced moments later by the rendered planet would look very Hollywoodish. People not reading this thread would think it's a cool effect, not realising that it's there to correct a bug.

Also, the above image is freely available in Photoshop or Illustrator:
http://serc.carleton.edu/usingdata/nasa ... ndex4.html
So one doesn't even have to recreate it.

I think the worry is with using a bitmap that different planets are different sizes, so you would have the wireframe and then it would shrink/grow when replaced. Looks messy. Another way around it would be a vector graphic as offosed to a bitmap, that could be scaled to match size without issues. However I have no idea if that could be done without just making things worse.

Scaling the wireframe to the size of the planet would be trivial, regardless of whether a bitmap or an OpenGL rendering is used.

Incidentally, that pic isn’t green. ;-)