Oolite Bulletins

played around to find Drew´s firefox.... with my Oolite dat file viewer... and noticed...

Is there any specific reason that the faces of alot of OXP models are flipped. modelers will know what i mean...

One of them is the Cobra courier SE, marked with the text Hooked Camels... found in random hits... and there are alot in realistic shipyards, even the imperial courier has these flaws..

i counterchecked, with the build in models... adder, anaconda, and so on, they are viewed correctly

now it will be easy to write something for my viewer that will allow a user to flip the faces in the viewer...

but what is the reason for this...

Here is a picture of what i mean



I then proceded to check HOopys casino, that one has the same flipped faces... weird since afaik that one is made by giles...

however. grifs kraits and random hits station are just fine...

The courier SEt however, its red engine exhaust flickers at long range, and sometimes, something seems visually wrong with it... and i bet it is because of the flipped faces....

Well made it so i can flip the faces... now got sidetracked to fix all the possible crash points

I've noticed this in some of my models as well, but found no easy way to fix it. I think they get flipped when you use the obj2dat python script on Windows to turn them into Oolite format...

i *think* there was talk at one point that the reason Elite could manage it's clever hidden-line-removal effects was the way the ships were drawn, ie concave. perhaps Oolite uses this same engine? for some reason, textures get flipped too so if you want lettering on your ship you need to do it in reverse (which is quite irritating), i don't know if that's related.

There was some stuff about reversed textures a while back, here...

Maybe the ships with the flipped faces were exported as obj's from different 3d packages?
I make all my stuff in Lightwave, but lightwaves obj exporter does odd things if i try and make a dat out of a lightwave exported obj file - the models looks completely wrong as if the polys are connecting to the wrong points, bringing the model into wings and then using that to export the obj seems to work fine with the 'dat-ification' process.
Your dat model viewer looks like a fantastic piece of work by the way, very cool!

This happened to all my models originally, truly a PITA to remember to put in all the textures flipped so that they were correct in the model

A new version of obj2dattex.py resolved the issue; mine is 7,555 bytes, last mod 26 Aug 08.