Standard station textures

[pagroove]

I made some new station textures. Since I posted a screenshot in the Random hits topic I thought it deserves it own topic. Are there also other people who 'designed' their own station textures? And I mean after the releases of the Gritty Corolius or the Sungs versions?

I can make them public after next weekend if you like it. I have also made a new anaconda.

[LittleBear]

Nice. What about a "Pimp my Corolius" competation? As a suggested rule:- Post an OXP with a like_shiped Corolius with the texture attached to the renamed model and the role set to Corolius(0.5). That way with one entry half the Corolius Stations get one new texture, but if say 10 people put in Pimped Stations then 5% have WriterA's texture, 5% writerBs and so on. Any takers?

[pagroove]

Thats an Excellent idea. I like it. We then get much more variation in the game. Question. Is it possible to make some text display on the station that displays the station's name automatically?

Here's another screenshot:

[LittleBear]

You can set the name with a like-ship, if you like by doing:-

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<key>pangroove_alt_coriolis-station</key>
<dict>
<key>like_ship</key>
<string>coriolis-station</string>
<key>roles</key>
<string>coriolis(0.5) station oolite-coriolis-station(0.5) station</string>
<key>name</key>
<string>Pangroove's Base</string>
<key>model</key>
<string>pangroove_alt_coriolis.dat</string>
</dict>

If you wanted you could then have a load of like_ships like:-

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<key>pangroove_alt_coriolis-station2</key>
<dict>
<key>like_ship</key>
<string>pangroove_alt_coriolis-station2</string>
<key>name</key>
<string>Griff's High Orbiter</string>
</dict>

To get lots of different names for the Stations.

[Cmdr. Maegil]

Sorry for the blunt, honest criticism...

It seems a bit stretched on some of the sides, and too much like a strereogram spread over a D20.

[pagroove]

Thats right but this was the best I could do at the time. I've used these textures about a year now.

But in daily use I find that the stretching not very severe. But textures are always a matter of taste. Therefore LB's 'pimp the station' competition seems like a good idea.

[Commander McLane]

Nice. What about a "Pimp my Corolius" competation? As a suggested rule:- Post an OXP with a like_shiped Corolius with the texture attached to the renamed model and the role set to Corolius(0.5). That way with one entry half the Corolius Stations get one new texture, but if say 10 people put in Pimped Stations then 5% have WriterA's texture, 5% writerBs and so on. Any takers?

If the wiki is right, then this is not correct.

The game engine constantly calls for generic roles to populate the universe. In the example below the ship in question will be considered twice as often (2.0) when a trader is called for, only one quarter as often (0.25) when looking for a hunter, and as often as any other pirate ships when looking for a pirate.
Example:

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<key>roles</key>
<string>hunter(0.25) trader(2.0) pirate</string>

So if you want your new Coriolis to appear as often as the standard one (half of the time), you have to type coriolis as a role. This means it gets into the pool of stations just like the standard Coriolis. And when the engine takes a station out of the pool, in order to put it in a system, it may choose either of them with the same probability.

If you type coriolis(0.5) as a role, your ship will get into the pool only half as often as the standard Coriolis. So when the engine chooses from the pool, it will find the standard Coriolis twice as often as your station, resulting in a probability of 2/3 vs 1/3. If there is another entry in the pool with coriolis(0.5), the overall probability will be 1/2 vs 1/4 vs 1/4 in favour of the standard Coriolis. And so on.

If you give your station the role coriolis(2), you turn around the chances. Now your station enters into the pool twice as often as the standard Coriolis, so the probability of appearance will be 2/3 vs 1/3 in favour of your station. If there is another one with coriolis(2), it will be 2/5 vs 2/5 vs 1/5 in favour against the standard Coriolis.

And the last case: If there is one custom station with role coriolis(2) and another one with role coriolis(0.5), the total probability of them being chosen from the pool will be 4/7 vs 2/7 (standard Coriolis) vs 1/7.

In general, the probabilities you may give to your station or ship, by assigning it in brackets to its role (like coriolis(0.5)) represent a fraction, but you cannot determine what fraction, because the game has to calculate it first. All normal appearances of your role (without a number attached in brackets) represent a value of 1. And all these values have to be added first. So if there are 7 ships with the role hunter, the total value is 7. Therefore the probability for each of them to be chosen is 1/7. If there are three more ships with a role hunter(0.5), another two with hunter(0.1) and one with hunter(2), the sum will be 10.7, and things get more complicated, the least common denominator suddenly is 107, and the probabilities of the ships to be chosen is 10/107 vs 10/107 vs 10/107 vs 10/107 vs 10/107 vs 10/107 vs 10/107 vs 5/107 vs 5/107 vs 5/107 vs 1/107 vs 1/107 vs 20/107 (which is the same as 1/10.7, 0.5/10.7, 0.1/10.7 and 2/10.7 respectively).

EDIT: The general formula for determining the probability of a certain ship appearing when its role is called, can be expressed in the following formula:

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           probability value of your ship
-----------------------------------------------------
sum of probability values of all ships with that role

Whenever there is no number in brackets in the role definition, the probability value of this ship is 1, if there is a number, it's this number instead of 1.

Anyway, the bottom line here is: If you want to have your ship or station appear as often as any other with the same role, just give it its role, without adding anything in brackets.

[Eric Walch]

If you give your station the role coriolis(2), you turn around the chances. Now your station enters into the pool twice as often as the standard Coriolis, so the probability of appearance will be 2/3 vs 1/3 in favour of your station. If there is another one with coriolis(2), it will be 2/5 vs 2/5 vs 1/5 in favour against the standard Coriolis.

Correct! I just want to add that you also can add a condition key wit a set of conditions when a ship may appear.

e.g.

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<key>conditions</key>
<array>
	<string>systemEconomy_number lessthan 3</string>
</array>

This condition is not used for selection to add, but for selection to the pool of ships that may be added. But if you put the chances in roles high, it becomes more likely that your ship is chosen once the conditions are met.

When you use conditions just make sure they don't contradict the rules for station appearing or they never appear:

coriolis stations only appear at techlevel < 11

At higher levels the system choses between dodecahedron and icosahedron.

For selection stations the selection over roles is not the best in my opinion. It results in that there could be a different station in a certain system every time you enter it. I think everything should be randomised, but not the type of station. One can bypass this role selection by using pseudoFixedD100_number. This is a random number but will always be the same for a certain system. So you can use next selection:

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<key>conditions</key>
<array>
	<string> pseudoFixedD100_number lessthan 20</string>
	<string>systemEconomy_number lessthan 3</string>
</array>
<key>roles</key>
<string>coriolis(1000) station</string>

The condition makes that it is only true in 20% of the cases with a economy less than 3. That will only be industrial systems. But because of the fixedD100 the 20% will always be the same 20% of the industrial systems.

When this condition is met, the high roles probability makes it likely it than will be there every time.

[Selezen]

It's nice - needs a bit of work on texture wrapping, but looks damn good.

Talking about Pimp My... competitions, were there ever any results for the Pimp My Cobra competition?

[Captain Hesperus]

It's nice - needs a bit of work on texture wrapping, but looks damn good.

Talking about Pimp My... competitions, were there ever any results for the Pimp My Cobra competition?

I believe Giles was going to judge the winner.......

Captain Hesperus

[LittleBear]

If there was only one entry in the competion then giving the competition entry the role coriolis(0.5), then I can see that would only give a 25% chance of the competetion entry appearing and to give it a 50% chance you would need just the role coriolis. (There are two items in the pool each with an equal chance). However if there were 19 entries, then there would be 20 items in the pool and if they all had the role coriolis then the orginal coriolis would only have a 1/20 chance of appearing. So don't you need to reduce the role proability for each competion entry to less than 1 if you want the chance of a competion entry being chosen to be 50%? With 10 entries should each role have a coriolis(0.05) to make the total chance of a competion entry being chosen to be 50%?

I wasn't thinking of anybody judging it. But if there are any takers, when there are a fair number of corioliss (or should that be corioli) paste the lot together in one PimpedCoriolis.oxp Your Ad Here style.

[Wolfwood]

A simple vote (=poll) should be enough to determine the "winner" of any such competition.

Although... I now wonder if we have polls enabled on this forum, or not...

[pagroove]

Ok, But are there other people wanting to take part in such a competition at the moment?

I do not have the programming skills. But I'm sure anyone of the scripters can make such a competition happen.

It sounds fun to me

[pagroove]

It strikes to me though that we have to watch out for the other objects that use the textures (such as metal.png) because some OXP's use them. I designed my texture first for the original Corolius. But it also looks reasonable on the DODO station

BTW fantastic game is this. Thanks to all the OXP developers

[LittleBear]

Thats why its better to release a small OXP with renamed textures. . If you just open the model for the corolis with a text editor and do a search and replace for all the metal.png etc with pangroove_mental.png. Close it and save it as pangroove_corolis.dat Then rename your textures pangroove_metal.png etc. You OXP then adds an alternative corolis to the game without overwriting any of the native textures and so your OXP won't clash with anyone elses. Could do the same thing with the Dodo too. The extra shipdata and model files only add about 3k to the download file as they are just a few lines of text.