Oolite Bulletins

Just thought whether planets with rings would work. You could have lots of asteroids together making the rings up, and maybe cargo canisters from vehicles that came to a grizzly fate. You may be able to make lots of money out of these, but it would be a dangerous buisiness.

Maybe there'd be hermit rocks in the rings, or salvage robots. What do you think?

building rings that way would cause the game to crawl to a halt...

bazillions of objects, so close together all having to be tracked by the engine's collision detection algorythm, yo'd get 4fps...

Trouble is, if you use solid rings like in X2 it is just dumb.

And the scale is all wrong for real rings. Everything in the Elite universe is very small compared to real life, and rings in propertion to the planet would be pretty small.

So rings made of rocks you'd be through in a couple of seconds, at most.

Not that I haven't considered the idea myself.

I did think it would slow it down... maybe fine sand...

I don't think nice rings could be done nicely until some sort of transparency can be used in textures. That way a huge flat torus model could be used with a texture containing some transparency elements which would make a nice ring effect.

I tried to build a ring in my favorite system, for use in asteroid dodge races.

It consists of 16 clusters of asteroids.
Some hermits/piratecoves and rings are added and some other stuff.

Unfortunately I made an error in triangulating my planet, so the ring now crashes into the planet itself.
It does take half a minute to load a savegame in the system. And sometimes things get a bit jerky if a trading convoy crosses a piratecove's stake.

Using Q-mines is not advised either.


Just saying: It can be done, but lowend machines might not cope.


Some code wizzard creating a marked localised increase in dustparticles would be a much appreciated effect.
(Or an object-generated fog/particulate effect, creating an area of dust around asteroids)
A true ring would still need a transparency effect for long distance visual rings.

What does the Oolite Community count as a low spec'd machine?

I've got an Athlon XP 2500+, 768MB DDR2700, 128MB FX5600

Oolite generally runs at an odd cyclic fps of 66-62-32-66-62-32... with the odd hang up which claims 4fps but is in fact 0fps for 1-2s (no additional CPU load either during these hangs).

I'm hoping that a work colleague is going to sell me his 256MB FX5700 and XP2800+ (with the same mobo as I've already got so swapping in components should be a doddle) for about £50 - and I should recoup most of this when I sell his mobo with my 2500+ and FX5600 in it on eBay...

I'm hoping with such an abundance of gpu memory available - texture swapping should become a thing of the past - that and I can o/c the 2800+ up to a 3000+ on my current HSF.

OpenGL can do transparencies quite easily - I also play Urban Terror online which is a Quake 3 Total Conversion and that's full of textures (windows/water/smoke) that is varying in transparency from almost full (0.95ish - glass) to almost none (0.1ish smoke) - so is the transparent textures an issue with OpenGL or Oolite itself? I haven't progammed in OpenGL (via GLUT) for many years so I bow down to superior coding knowledge found on the BBs...

To quote Giles himself: minimum 400MHz (That's PowerPC)

I play Oolite on a 350MHz PPC machine But I guess that's no longer low specced but underspecced Times are achangeing. But that's still okay w/o much addons, though manual docking is *hard* (close to the station I get less than 15 FPS sometimes 6-10 fps ouch!) and with more than say 5-6 other ships around things get jerky... Still, It's playable (though assassins, I'm getting into missions that are too much for the ole bugger...) And I think it's mainly the old graphics card RAGE 128 that is the biggest culprit. Any reasonably specced machine is okay.

@Rxke - thanks for the info - we use a lot of PowerPC processors at work - I've got some (7) 450MHz G4s running in parallel doing real time simulations in teeny-tiny timesteps (20uS) - the box cost almost £20K to put together put we haven't got a PC to touch it yet - just goes to show it aint all about clock speed!

I'm now running with a 2800+ but I still my get cyclic fps and it still glitches and micro-hangs - maybe it'll go (or improve) when I put in the FX5700 (and I'll be able to install latest Forceware drivers rather than the older ones Leadtek make me use for the A310 VIVO card I've got in at the moment) afterall everything is driven on the PC by 3DMark0X which is all DirectX and nobody really gives a hoot about how well the OpenGL drivers worked.

My old Voodoo3 and later my Voodoo5 used to pee all over all but my latest gfx cards by using the small but beautifully proportioned WickedGL drivers for playing Quake3 (but that's mainly coz ATi really do write shockingly bad OpenGL drivers (or atleast they did))

I guess within the Oolite community (being a cross platform XP/Linux/Mac kinda thing) I'm not doing too bad - compared to when I tried to play Quake 4 online where I was barred from most servers coz my PC wasn't quick enough!! So I stopped playing (as did most other people!) - but that'll teach them to abandon their OpenGL roots and move to DX9 (oh and it'll all start again with Vista only DX10 games... )

I think I'll reinstall fraps and get a true measurement of my fps....