Oolite Bulletins

gonna try and build some ships in Blender, got a couple quick questions :

1) wiki says "export to obj and convert to dat - windows users will have to get a Mac user to do the converting" - ?? how come? i don't know any mac users anyway, isn't there any utils out there i can get?

2) the plist entries - is there a list of all possible entries for each catergory?

3) how do i test my ship before i upload it? i'm thinkng i could set the Role to Pirate and hop into an anaarchy or something, but (a) it'll probbly attack me and make it hard to assess it, and (b) ships are (i assume) generated at random so can i force a choice of my new ship?


ta in advance!
KW
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Killer Wolf wrote:

gonna try and build some ships in Blender, got a couple quick questions :

1) wiki says "export to obj and convert to dat - windows users will have to get a Mac user to do the converting" - ?? how come? i don't know any mac users anyway, isn't there any utils out there i can get?

2) the plist entries - is there a list of all possible entries for each catergory?

3) how do i test my ship before i upload it? i'm thinkng i could set the Role to Pirate and hop into an anaarchy or something, but (a) it'll probbly attack me and make it hard to assess it, and (b) ships are (i assume) generated at random so can i force a choice of my new ship?

1) Don't know about Blender. For obj exported from Wings you just use the Python script Obj2DatTex.py. No need for a Mac.

2) Most are in the Wiki under shipdata.plist. The rest you'll have to discover reading others' oxps and this bb

3) https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.ph ... ript#24841

Sorted, cheers Doc.

boo, just read about a 300 triangle limit, that might bugger my plans a bit

KW
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Killer Wolf wrote:

Sorted, cheers Doc.

boo, just read about a 300 triangle limit, that might bugger my plans a bit

KW
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There there. I think you might be able to work around it with subentities.

LOL, i'll take your word for it! past Photoshop, my technical abilites are just about capable of managing Etch-a-Sketch

KW
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There is a lot of play within the 300 triangle limit + subentities for instance, in this thread, Selezen used subentities to create this model of the Battlestar Galactica, thus:


Just some food for thought.

Captain Hesperus
"I wonder what the cargo capacity on one of those would be. Nah, forget it, the wages for the crew would bankrupt me!"

Best of luck with the modeling...

FWIW up to a few months ago I had never touched a 3D package & got into doing ships for Oolite because I wanted a Falcon ( sad I know )

Now B.inc squirts out a fairly steady supply of new ships

Tips?

I have yet to find any 3D package to be anywhere close to user-friendly
This made the steap learnig curve very difficult - keep @ it, you'll get there.

Use the 'best' package you can lay your hands on. Wings 3D is good but a bit primative in my opinion - only makes learning harder.

I use: 3DS-Max for modeling, Ultimate Unwrap 3D for skining, & Milkshape 3D for final tweaking before the .obj file goes to the python script mentioned above to make the .dat file needed by Oolite.

Why?
3DS - good modeling tools, most of the rest remains a mystery to me.
UU3D - good ( easy to use ) skining tools & good for minute tweaking.
MS3D - consistently produces .obj files with fewer verts than any other & the python script seems prone to 'choaking' on .obj files produced by any package but this. ( and Wings 3D )

The low-poly restrictions in Oolite make life hard but as said above once you have the hang you can increase this with sub-entities.
If nothing else I guess it's teaching me the value of being disiplined in my modeling. Also I would suggest the model is actually the least important part.
1) Imagination.
2) Good textures. ( your photoshop experience should help )

Finally:
Grab bits of others .oxp's & tweak - it's mostly been done before so don't reinvent the wheel

Wellcome.

-end of long post-

An easy way to test a ship is to give it the role test.

Add a simple script, that just has a:-
Four of your ships are added near the station everytime you launch. When your happy with it, delete the script and change its role to pirate, police, trader or whaterver you want it to be.

PS : Tepmoraly giving the ship nullAI is also handy, as it'll sit there and do nothing, allowing you to fly round it and check its textures and sub-entries are comming up right.

sweet, ta for all the help people

i'm gonna try using blender, i've used it very very basically before so i've at least had my paw in the door. probbly be a good few weeks before anything comes off the assembly line tho!

Btw: I think the limit to triangles is 512, not 300?

Charlie, or anyone else w/ Milkshape experience...

this is doing my head in. i'm modelling my ship and i just can't make sense of the views in the windows. For the sake of trying to explain w/out visual aids, imagine i'm talking about a Mamba. okay :
in the "Top" window, the Mamba's nose is to the top
in the "Right" window, the nose is at the right hand side, flat belly below, engines to the left.
in the "Left" window, the nose is at the left, engines to the right.

all that sounds good, yes? the prob is the "Front" window : it shows me the back of my craft despite the other views being correct. my ship has wings (imagine the Mamba w/ a little wing) - i've modelled the Right half of the ship (tute said do this then mirror and weld), the vertices origin is midway along the ship, up against the edge i will join the mirror image to, and in the Right and Left and Top windows it all looks fine, but in the Front window, the wing is on the wrong side, eveything's reversed. and it's not just me getting the wireframe mixed up - i created a face on the back to blank everything out when viewed as shaded, and sure enough in the Front view it appears and blanks everything out >:-/

i just don't get it at all - how can three views be right but the front and back views be inverted? if it says the engine bit is the "front", then on the Right window the nose would be at the *left*, right? akk

any help would be greatly appreciated, i don't wanna spend wads of time on this if i've buggered it up somehow.


cheers!


PS - oh, just as an after thought : i thought i'd try and import it into Blender to see what it looked like in there, so i did an Export as Lightwave - Blender wouldn't recognise it, just had the name in black, can't open it. same w/ 3DO exported version - i dunno if MS is exporting it incorrectly or Blender isn't opening it properly?

Dr.-SPACE-Nil wrote:

Btw: I think the limit to triangles is 512, not 300?

I thought that myself. But I try to keep triangles below 200, to be safe. The classic snake ships are well below 100 triangles apiece.

@ Killer Wolf:
Ah yes...

Not heplful I know, but the views in MS3D got me a bit turned around too.

The tutorials on the support sites may help a bit...

TBH I gave up using it for serious work & keep it just for the tweaking tools.
Also it produces models with many fewer verts than any other package I've used, & as you alluded to just because a 3D package claims to export a file-type doesn't mean it's readable
MS3D does seem to be good @ that...

3D object converter seems to be the most reliable software for converting between file-types that I've used.

So far as a 'dose user:
Model in whatever you like best. ( Or in my case dislike least )
Save in one of it's native formats.
Import into MS3D ( for preferance to get those verts down ) or 3D OC and use one of these to export the .obj file.

Why? I've yet to find another package that produces .obj files the Python conversion script -> .dat doesn't choke on...

You could do it all in Wings, but not my preferance.
Also I've found Wings does some odd things to some of my models made in other packages, but doesn't throw up any errors to warn about it.

-another long ramble, sorry-

thanks Charlie. after much fretting, i decided "bugger it!" and subscribe to the "if it looks right, just accept it!" credo

finished my Mk I craft - did a horrendously idiotic newbie mistake mind : i did a floorplan, faced it, then a dorsal spine of verts, faced that and the sides etc....prob is, it was only AFTER completion that i twigged i'd faced the floorplan/underside in "Top" view...so yeah, you guessed....all my faces faced INTO the ship X-(
fortunately a guy on the DarkBASIC site gave me a tip and i've managed to sort it, lost a couple faces but it let me replace them no bother. i've learnt to make groups now, heh!

anyways, onto another aspect : a couple of ship packs i've downloaded have a ship, and a couple variants included w/ different skins etc - how do you set the frequency of the appearance? say i wanted to make a normal ship and a snazzy tweaker boy-racer type that was rarer : how do i make the snazzy one only appear 1/4 the amount of times of the normal?

cheers,

Either script the ship (as in SuperCobra or Boyracers) or do it will role.

give the normal ship the role pirate (say) in shipdata, but the rare version the role pirate(0.25).