Oolite Bulletins

Now on better File Host.


Just five ships in this, all playable.

The Mugger
The Hoodlum
The Spiv
The Assassin
The Scoundrel

They all load up in the demo screen, but not had time to see them in flight (I'm really quite bad at the save game tinkering, even with a step by step guide).

I'm sure you'll let me know if there are any problems.

The Thug is missing - still too many faces. Oh well, i'll put it in next time.
Mega ships tomorrow, all going well

Pirate Clan One: The Blitzspears
To Come:

AI.

I want each clan to have a different strategy - all out attack, surprise, obfuscation, distance fighting, cat's paw, etc.

Look out for the suprise asteroid attack in future versions.

More Ships

I want a generic base (which I've done, but not the subentities) and a couple of bigger pirate ships, such as frigates and destroyers). For memory sake, I may keep the bigger ships to all clans and just change the skins.

Joinable Pirate Clans

Something to keep you lively.

Query: How do I put them on the wiki page?

Amen Brick wrote:

How do I put them on the wiki page?

You'll need to contact Winston for a login.

Hello Amen,

maybe you should test them in the game. It is often not enough to see them on the demoscreen.

1. Hoodlum-player and Hoodlum-Player is not the same. Some systems are case-sensitive and will result in an error.
2. I don't know if this is your intention, but ships under 10m are a little bit small. And a big exhaust (10 times bigger than the ship itself) looks a little bit strange :-)
3. It seems that they are not correctly centered (0,0,0).

Hello Amen Brick

..., but not had time to see them in flight

To see them you probably need a mac. With Cmd-Alt-8 you turn zooming on. Then you zoom in to see them. On a Windows machine you probably need a regular magnifying glass.

Exhausts have normal dimensions. It took me a wile to discover there was also a ship flying in front of the flames. Actually very realistic: When I see pictures of a space shuttle launching, I see something similar.

However, I think it was not intended to be so small. Success with further developments. Only set bounty to zero. The system will give them a bounty when they become pirates. Now, you get offender escorts with clean traders. This results in Cops attacking the traders.

Hi Amen Brick,

cool new ships you are creating there!

Concerning the roles conundrum ...

Only set bounty to zero. The system will give them a bounty when they become pirates. Now, you get offender escorts with clean traders. This results in Cops attacking the traders.

... this can happen rather easy if you don`t know exactly yet how they work ... for veteran scripters it seems to be self-explaining, but as a newbie in this legacy scripting thingy I think it`s rather easy to make mistakes like those mentioned above ...

You can find a compilation of do`s and don`t`s I found helpful here:

http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Role

And then I have a question to the assembled scripters myself:

How does one see fast how long and broad a given ship in metres is via the models?

@Amen Brick: Keep up the good work!

L

Lestradae wrote:

And then I have a question to the assembled scripters myself:

How does one see fast how long and broad a given ship in metres is via the models?

The measurements are in the .mod files. Some programs make it easy and put the dimensions in a clear readable form at the beginning of this mod file. This is also true for the ships in this oxp. But I never created a ships model so I don't know how to size them in the fist step. Demo screen shows them well because that one shrinks/enlarges them to fit.

You also should be aware that sizes, distances and speeds in the Ooniverse are really messed up. E.g. the ships are much bigger than you would think in the first place. This is needed in order to make them visible at all in front of the huge black universe. For instance the Adder, not a particularly big ship (can carry only two tons) is already 45 x 8 x 30 (W x H x L) meters big (although I am thinking now that this should probably be 30 x 8 x 45; indeed, says the .dat-file). The Cobra3 is already 130 x 30 x 65.

The ships-page in the wiki lists all ships, and there are size-informations for (almost) all existing ships. That should be a good starting point to determine in which league you think your ship shall play, and what size it roughly needs for that.

Oh, and if the dimensions are not user-friendly given on the top of the .dat-file (which can conveniently be opened with any text-editor), then you just screen through the coordinates of the vertices below, find the biggest and the smallest x-, y-, and z-coordinate and calculate the difference between them. Voilà.

Commander McLane wrote:

You also should be aware that sizes, distances and speeds in the Ooniverse are really messed up. E.g. the ships are much bigger than you would think in the first place.

Yeh, take for instance the 1-Ton barrels. They are roughly 9 meters long and 5 meters wide. When you would fill such large thing with water they would weight over 200 tons. Just a waste of space to fill it only with 1 ton of something.

On the other hand are all planets 100 times smaller than shown. When the F7 screen says a planet is 6 000 000 m in radius, the radius is actually drawn at 60 000 meter in size. So planets are to small and ships to big, all this to get a workable game were it doesn't take ages to fly around the planet.

I know about the messed-up thing from an old thread I read somewhere. Apparently Giles made a quick testrun with a never-published Oolite version in which he made all solar system distances and sun & planet radii + scanner range 100 times bigger and the speeds 100 times faster.

He reported that he could no longer even find ships, they would just wooosh past and never be seen by the naked eye ...

Thanks for the measurement tips, looking into the matter.

L

So to compress:

Ships need to be larger
Roles need to be sorted
Bounty needs to be cleared
Engine Exhausts need to be moved

?

Amen Brick wrote:

So to compress:

Ships need to be larger
Roles need to be sorted
Bounty needs to be cleared
Engine Exhausts need to be moved

?

? = "Hoodlum-player and Hoodlum-Player is not the same" to quote Svengali:

You have to take care of case sensitivity, obviously there are systems which don`t equate an "A" with an "a", know what I mean?

That added.

Cheers

L

thanks all. be sorted tomorrow (maybe not the exhaust thing, gonna have to work out where they go on my models).

You can use Wings to get the positions for exhausts, flashers etc by looking up vertex co-ordinates, make sure you 'flip' the X co-ordinate value (the first of the 3 co-ordinate numbers), ie make it a negative value if it's originally a positive value, or make it a positive value if it's originally a negative value (what is the proper maths term for that? is it to change the numbers sign?)

in the pic above, if i wanted a exhaust plume to originate at the highlighted vertex's position in oolite, the co-ordinates in the shipdata.plist would be 1.0 1.0 1.0 and not -1.0 1.0 1.0

That's quite amazingly helpful, thanks!

Also, aren't ships big? Must be going on 50 - 100 times the size of the original cube given in Wings! I scaled up a bit and adjusted a save game (remembering to keep my old save this time) to buy one of the ships and it's still tiny . Oh, well. Now I know why all those 3ds files I imported where ginormous.

Can you scale up the grid and direction arrows in wings or is it best just to do it small and scale up later?

You can scale up or down at any point. Just make sure that you choose the "normals"-option for scaling in order to keep the proportions.