Oolite Bulletins

i've decided to have a go at remaking everyones favourite two pronged pointy ship... the krait, fully kitted out the model comes in at a whopping 1270 polygons (!) and uses a whole bunch of texture maps, on my ageing athlon xp2100, 512mb ram pc you can fight about 12 at a time before the frame rate gets slightly choppy.

here we see the basic model,



and here's one a bit more kitted out with scoops, energy units, fuel injectors etc








and a glowy version ready for when somebody else does a glowy ship oxp with shader code that's ready to copy & paste into this ship

Err, like, WOW!

Very very nice but I can imagine that people will say it looks nothing like the original. To my eye, it doesn't look like it would carry 10 tonne of cargo but perhaps I'm not quite getting the scale of it.

Wow they look amazing! but not much like a Krait! . Military ships or some advanced pirates coming into GalCop space from the Imperial sector (this being the Imperial build of the krait)? A quick script to add a little squads of them from time to time would be cool.

Nice, although it’s cleary not even vaguely related to the Krait. :-)

Toss it over and I’ll glowificate it.

oh no, does a krait hold 10T? i didn't check the manual!

Ahruman, thanks for offering to glow up the texture! i've just got a few bits to do to the glowy skin first then i'll upload it to the box.net filesharing site.

Ahruman, i'm currently drawing out an effects map for the hull 'lights', have i got this right:-

blue = laser heat
green = hull heat
red = engine power

so my effects map needs to be painted red on black so that the glow effect is tied into the engine power?

I think this looks great, and certainly an update of the original. You can see the original Krait in there somewhere - like the new Transformers movie - it's the same but better. I'd like to see your interpretation of the Asp (I'm doing one based on the Millennium Falcon - but Asp shaped )

Griff wrote:

Ahruman, i'm currently drawing out an effects map for the hull 'lights', have i got this right:-

blue = laser heat
green = hull heat
red = engine power

so my effects map needs to be painted red on black so that the glow effect is tied into the engine power?

Not really. :-) The Shady Cobra shader expects red = engine power, green = laser heat, blue = illumination. Hull heat is constant over the ship.

The “illumination” one is limited, though. It’s like casting white light on the surface, which isn’t useful for your red and green lights. Ideally, for your design, you’d have three textures: one base, which is the ship with all the lights off; one permanent glow map, which is a full RGB texture for the red and green lights which I assume are on all the time, and the third with the engine-related glows. This could either be RGB (for maximum flexibility) or a single channel specifying intensity, with preselected hue. (Making the most intense parts whiter is quite easy.)

If you do a single channel, the other channels could be used for, say, laser heat (intensity specifies how much each part of the ship is heated by the laser, and the shader selects a colour based on temperature, as with the Shady Cobra) and a shininess map (0 means matte, 100% means very shiny).

Wow! , you've raised the bar again Griff.

Ahruman, the 'illumination' map you mentioned in the shady cobra example, could it be used to make dockingbays not recieve shadow and appear lit even if the station is pointing away from the sun, such as in this mockup image below, where i've just upped the dockingbay surface 'illumination' property in lightwave 3d and rendered it out:-


is this the effect that an illumination map would give in oolite?

I've split the texture maps up as below, am i going about this the correct way?

[docking port]
Pretty much, yeah.

Although ideally, the illumination effects on the wall would be illumination mapped, and the white and red lights, and the green lights on the outside (plus their halos) would be glow-mapped. :-)

[glow maps]
Looks right.

I've uploaded the 'krait' to here

http://www.box.net/shared/s2z4smtp8z

Looks great in game, a nightmare to spot though as it's so dark.
Have you not put it in the demo ships at the start?

Looks good. Surley worthy of being a "Krait Mk II" as the name!

Maybe set the sub-ents to fringible with low energy, so the enery units and other equipment can be shot off!

it would have been really great to have the ship frangible, but i had to split the bottom of the hull into a subentity to get around a weird UV map problem i was getting with the model, and unfortunately that meant that you could shoot the underside of the ship off which looked awful, but i'm hoping to add a few more variations of the ship into the shipdata.plist, some poor pirates and noob bounty hunters etc who haven't quite build up enough credits for all the equipment.

at the moment, the glowing stuff in the textures isn't in place, hopefully when that's in there the ships should stand out a bit more, but i definately need to tweak the textures a bit to get them brighter, i think the contrast/brightness settings on my monitor are too high as well which is probably making me paint stuff way too dark