Oolite Bulletins

I have recently installed the Thargoid Carriers OXP. However, on my machine - Celeron 2.66, 512MB, 256MB Nvidia G-Force 4, Debian Linux - when I destroy a carrier it generates so many fragments that the game becomes virtually unplayable.

Destroying 2 in Witch Space froze the game.

Is there a way to reduce the number of fragments produced? I've looked through the files and failed to spot anything which seems to define this.

The number of fragments is directly proportional to the mass of the ship, which in turn is directly propotional to the volume. I agree that this is a problem. (I remember complaining about this to Giles a while back.)

The fix should probably be to set it to something like the square root of the mass, or asymtotically approach a maximum value. (I’ve added it to my to-do list.)

speaking of mass, when i was looking through the STDERR files i noticed that every object is given a mass : how is that calculated? is it based on the internal volumes or something? seems an odd thing to be included, does teh game actually use that mass figure for anything?

Can fragments be assigned a finite length of life? - if that were so, a relatively short life were assigned to a largish percentage of the original wreck, this would reduce the long-term effects of destroying large ships...

Killer Wolf wrote:

speaking of mass, when i was looking through the STDERR files i noticed that every object is given a mass : how is that calculated? is it based on the internal volumes or something? seems an odd thing to be included, does teh game actually use that mass figure for anything?

As I said in the message you’re replying to, it’s based directly on the object’s volume. :-)

Mass is used in collision response, and in deciding how big an explosion to make.

what's going to be cool is that now with the shaders in 1.68, we can maybe put glowing fiery parts on the metal fragments so they look white-hot from the explosion, oh, maybe adapt some of the code from the freaky thargoid shader so the flames appear to run along the fragments surface

A thought occured to me today, couldn't the metal fragments have a texture to them nowadays? They do look very plain compared to the ships that are about now.

have the explosions been enhanced in v1.68? i shot a ship from very close range and it went up in a lovely gold fireball, so i blasted a couple more just to check i wasn't seeing things

This is an effect of the fancy new additive blending.

FWIW:
For big ships ( or where you don't want any debris ) a quick fix for this is to add landonPlanet to a deathactions entry in the shipdata.plist

If you're feeling v. clever futher entries can be made to spawn the amount of stuff you do want.

As mentioned elsewhere, 1.69 will have significantly less complex explosions for really big things.