Oolite Bulletins

Ever bought yourself a Boa Class Cruiser, a Python or an Anaconda and wanted to have a look at your proud new ship from the outside? And--there was not much to see, because the view positions were much too close to the ship?

Ever been confused by the naming of the external views with number 3 twice and no number 8?

Ever wondered what your ship looks like from above or below?

Congratulations! Here's the solution for you: externalviews.oxp!

This OXP changes the external views of all the original Oolite-ships by adjusting the viewpoints to the size of the ship. This makes the ships appear smaller on the screen, so you really can see your whole Cobra or Python from the outside, not only part of it.

It also corrects the naming of the external views. They are now correctly numbered from 1 to 8.

Finally the OXP adds two more external views, a Down View and an Up View. These are quite handy for taking screenshots of your ship. Feel free to use this code for your own OXP-ships.

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External Views.oxp now available on Oosat 2! (Thanks, Winston!)

Good job, Commander.

Your views should be made standard when/if the game is updated.

Nice job!

Thanks for the nice flowers, guys! Do I really deserve them?

Sure you do.
Lots of work and testing to get everything right.
And not to mention it's boring.
It had to be done, but nobody wanted to do it.

Or did you do it the smart way and work out the optimum distance from the shipdimensions?

I did it the sort of middle smart way, because there is no exact adjustment to each ship's dimensions. What I actually did was increasing all distances by multiples of sqr(2)/2, which worked fine. And it was an easy way, as it's already there in the original file (the viewponts at the corners of a regular octogon being at xy 0 1, 0.707 0.707 (which is actually sqr(2)/2), 1 0, -0.707 0.707 etc (any mathematicians out there who can follow this babble? ).

So yes, a bit boring, but that part of the work was done in ten minutes. The ten minutes before that were for browsing through the original shipdata.plist, erasing all NPC-entries and saving the resulting compilation of all player-ships only to the oxp.

It took me almost more time to write the readMe.

And it was fun! (My very first OXP!)

Having a break from painting - which is drying nicely on my face and starting to crack - nice job Cmdr. McLane - I never bother with the outside views because they were pretty rubbish but you've done a great job - well done!

By the way:

One nice feature of the external views is to enable you to see your ship fire its lasers. There is the
-method in each of the views, but it doesn't seem to work.

In fact when looking at any external view and hitting the laser it fires in the direction you used before hitting 'V'. So if you are switching to external views from let's say the port view and and then press 'A', you will see your port laser firing. And so on. That's also very useful for the designers among you to test whether your weapons are positioned well. Try it out!

I installed this OXP but now the V-key doesn't work anymore. The external views just don't show up. Any ideas?

Some ships don't have external views defined. While I was using the Supercobra, no External Views would happen, but everything else I've used so far supports them.

Magus Zeal wrote:

Some ships don't have external views defined. While I was using the Supercobra, no External Views would happen, but everything else I've used so far supports them.

Could some nice person fix that, I really miss the external views.......sob,

It would be a little too much to include the correct external views of ALL ever-published OXP-ships in this OXP. But here is an easy solution for all of you:

Open the shipdata.plist in externalviews.oxp and the shipdata.plist of the ship you're using. In the latter one you have to find the player-version (e.g. "supercobra-player").

Then you choose one of the ships in externalviews.oxp, preferably one that fits the size of your own ship. If you've got a SuperCobra, the CobraMkIII-entry should work just fine.

Copy everything between and and paste it into the shipdata of your player ship. The best place for that is just above the final of your ship's entry.

Save your shipdata.plist and restart Oolite. Now you've got yourself all the external views.

If your ship appears too small or too big on the screen, try another set of <key>custom_views</key>. The Adder has the closest viewpoints, the Anaconda and Boa the farthest. And finally: If you're flying an Ixian Cruiser or a Dredger you have to adjust the viewpoints yourself.

Thanks for the explanation, it works like a charm. I really like what you did with this OXP, thanks.

Hi. I just installed this exp in 1.69.1 and i'm afraid i can't get it to work. I have the default ship and the keys 1 to 8 are showing what they've always shown, the normal views and menu's.

Any tips on how i can get it to work. I am pressing the right keys.. right?

zeep wrote:

Hi. I just installed this exp in 1.69.1 and i'm afraid i can't get it to work. I have the default ship and the keys 1 to 8 are showing what they've always shown, the normal views and menu's.

Any tips on how i can get it to work. I am pressing the right keys.. right?

Nope. :-) (I think it’s v, offhand.)