Oolite Bulletins

Ok having played with Doc's Oo-Hauler and added lights to it and altered the cockpit "glass" a bit two thoughts struck me:

1) The lights don't actually illuminate - they glow but a white panel next to a red light still looks white - there is no reflected light tones from the light source

2) Everybody's flying around in shiny metal ships with shiny cockpit windows but there are no reflections of one object in another

Now, I know from what little experience I've had with OpenGL (1.3 using GLUT many years ago) - OpenGL is quite capable of these things and many quite old games that use OpenGL manage it too (Unreal Tourney, Quake 3 - to name the two I own). So I'm presuming Giles didn't think this was needed - having just noticed myself, he was probably right - but now I have noticed it's kind of quirky!

What does everybody else think? Is it needed? Can it be implemented? Any clever programmers out there able to make the mods?

A "Headlight" as a buyable item?

Would be cool, but think needs a charge to the exe!

Giles and Ahruman had a few conversations in the theads about this that went over everyone else's heads.

I think the shader work was meant to do some of this stuff. But shaders can only be guaranteed on the Mac - for instance I have no hardware capable of running Giles shader code.

There might be other ways to do it, like define the materials for the models to use specular lighting or something, but my knowledge of graphics coding isn't up to that stuff. I just leave all the OpenGL code as-is.

Real reflection mapping is a big project. It requires rendering six views of the universe for each object that’s intended to be shiny.

Hey, you are still here :) Good to hear from you again.

@Ahruman - six renderings? Jeez - at that point a lot of people's hardware is going to fall over (possibly mine included - although I call play UnR T and Q3A so possibly not) - and a lot of coding too - how about real lighting then i.e. a game light casts light of the correct colour of objects within a certain range? Any easier?

BTW, you've made the Cap'n very happy - the boy's got Cabin Fever I'm sure of it!

DaddyHoggy wrote:

BTW, you've made the Cap'n very happy - the boy's got Cabin Fever I'm sure of it!

*ka-click* <opens x10 scope cover>

Captain Hesperus
"Look out, he's got a broken milk carton!"
"Look out, he's got a broken candle!"
The Big Bus.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

how about real lighting then i.e. a game light casts light of the correct colour of objects within a certain range? Any easier?

Probably, but I for one ain’t doing it any time soon.