Oolite Bulletins

After trying a couple of roundabout methods to set up a special PC just for Oolite (stymied in the end by dud RAM chips) I ripped out the old nVidia FX5200 from the box I'd been planning to use for the project, and shoe-horned it into my everyday machine, a low-profile desktop Dell GX270.

Ok, so I can't close the lid any more, and I need to be a little careful about not snagging the cable in case it does damage to the unsupported card, but now I have shader support! I dialled up full shaders (non of this shaders-lite for me!) and took the ol' Gunboat Diplomat out for a spin.

Wowowowow!!! GOOOOD stuff! Finally I can see what all the fuss is about! I was so overjoyed I went and downloaded a bunch of eye-candy-ish oxp's that I hadn't worried about before and installed 'em all. Then I had some fun mucking about with gamma settings, but I'd been meaning to do that anyway once I had a card that let me play with such things.

The result? All I can say is... fan-friggin'-tastic! Elite IV stands no chance, IMNSHO!


The various ships are just beautiful, the Black Monk Monastery is amazing, and there just aren't words to describe Griff's Trade Outpost!

I was so blown away by my fly-bys of the TO that I went and got the great little open-source tool CamStudio so I could record it for posterity. It took some mucking about trying different settings and codecs, and I'm still not totally pleased with the result, but I got about 4.5 mins of footage I'm willing to release to the public.

So, here it is... It's recorded in 1024 x 768, so by all means watch it in full-screen mode if you wish (that way you can even see the background stars ). Running the game and recording almost 800 MB to harddisk at the same time resulted in it being a (very little) bit choppy, and there's no sound (this time) but overall, it's not bad.

I managed to capture 3 ships exiting the docking bay as I went past. If you watch closely, you'll see the second one (a Viper) take a potshot at an Ionics Huntsman, execute a quick looping 180 and bug out, almost immediately another Viper exits the TO and takes off after the Huntsman.

Man, how I LOVE this game!


(Is there some kind of prize for most exclamation marks in a single post?)

Nice video, love how the ID computer locks onto the Ionics ship when it exits the outpost.
Pity about the flickering though.

I think people watching this for the first time (not knowing Oolite) will be interested to find out more about this great, expandable game :8

Diziet Sma wrote:

After trying a couple of roundabout methods to set up a special PC just for Oolite (stymied in the end by dud RAM chips) I ripped out the old nVidia FX5200 from the box I'd been planning to use for the project, and shoe-horned it into my everyday machine, a low-profile desktop Dell GX270.

Ok, so I can't close the lid any more, and I need to be a little careful about not snagging the cable in case it does damage to the unsupported card, but now I have shader support! I dialled up full shaders (non of this shaders-lite for me!) and took the ol' Gunboat Diplomat out for a spin.

Wowowowow!!! GOOOOD stuff! Finally I can see what all the fuss is about! I was so overjoyed I went and downloaded a bunch of eye-candy-ish oxp's that I hadn't worried about before and installed 'em all. Then I had some fun mucking about with gamma settings, but I'd been meaning to do that anyway once I had a card that let me play with such things.

The result? All I can say is... fan-friggin'-tastic! Elite IV stands no chance, IMNSHO!


The various ships are just beautiful, the Black Monk Monastery is amazing, and there just aren't words to describe Griff's Trade Outpost!

I was so blown away by my fly-bys of the TO that I went and got the great little open-source tool CamStudio so I could record it for posterity. It took some mucking about trying different settings and codecs, and I'm still not totally pleased with the result, but I got about 4.5 mins of footage I'm willing to release to the public.

So, here it is... It's recorded in 1024 x 768, so by all means watch it in full-screen mode if you wish (that way you can even see the background stars ). Running the game and recording almost 800 MB to harddisk at the same time resulted in it being a (very little) bit choppy, and there's no sound (this time) but overall, it's not bad.

I managed to capture 3 ships exiting the docking bay as I went past. If you watch closely, you'll see the second one (a Viper) take a potshot at an Ionics Huntsman, execute a quick looping 180 and bug out, almost immediately another Viper exits the TO and takes off after the Huntsman.

Man, how I LOVE this game!


(Is there some kind of prize for most exclamation marks in a single post?)

Cool video - and it is a shame about the flickering but would certainly whet somebody's appetite - I'm amazed your 5200 can cope - especially if it's also trying to do the video capture as well. What CPU does the GX270 have?

However, you're missing a trick - get yourself the latest version of YAH pulled together by Ark and feature quite a lot of ads by Yours Truly (as well as Dimebodied, Griff, Pangloss and several others (apologies if I've missed you off!)) - then you'll see what the Trade Outpost used to look like - flashing Neon signs - scrolling banners - truly magical!

Thread is here

and some imagery to whet your appetite:

I've said it before. We need more Youtube movies to promote this wonderful game.

Rxke wrote:

Nice video, love how the ID computer locks onto the Ionics ship when it exits the outpost.
Pity about the flickering though.

I think people watching this for the first time (not knowing Oolite) will be interested to find out more about this great, expandable game :8

Thanks... yeah, I spotted the Huntsman coming out and hit the key at exactly the right moment to lock onto him.. I was pretty rapt about that.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Cool video - and it is a shame about the flickering but would certainly whet somebody's appetite - I'm amazed your 5200 can cope - especially if it's also trying to do the video capture as well. What CPU does the GX270 have?

Thanks... I plan to keep trying to see what I can do about that flickering, I have a couple of ideas to try. The 5200 has 128M of DDR RAM, the GX270 has a 2.8G P4 with 1.5G of RAM. I think the flickering mostly happens when CamStudio makes a key-frame, once per second. That's when it saves a full frame instead of simply recording the changes from the frame before. I can specify key-frame timing, but only up to a maximum interval of 5 seconds.

The only real reason I haven't installed YAH is because of the crashing-into-billboards-on-exiting-witchspace issue. And I was meaning to ask if it was possible to get the Neon Trade Outpost into the game, it really should be an optional download on the TO Wiki page. Thanks for that suggestion, I'll install YAH too...

Hmmm... lessee... that will make 67 OXP's installed atm..

pagroove wrote:

I've said it before. We need more Youtube movies to promote this wonderful game.

I couldn't agree more! So, grab a copy of CamStudio (and the CamStudio Codec) or whatever will work on your system, and start making some Oolite movies... it takes a bit of thinking about just what you want to capture, and sometimes several takes, but it's worth the effort.

I'm also going to give Freez Screen Video Capture a try, to see if it does a better job than CamStudio. CamStudio only records to its own installation folder, (though you can specify where to put its temp files) and I suspect that if I can record to an external drive, I may be able to avoid the flickering problem.

Edit to add:
Hmmm... it looks like the Freez program is LESS configurable than CamStudio.. bummer.. I'll keep looking to see what I can find in the way of free software, since my budget is pretty tight right now...

Is Camstudio free then? Or am I mixing it up with Camtasia which I know is definitely NOT free!

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Is Camstudio free then? Or am I mixing it up with Camtasia which I know is definitely NOT free!

Yep, both free as in beer and free as in open source..

If it works under Ubuntu then I may well give it a whirl ( I have a comparable CPU and memory and a bit better gfx card - XP2800+, 1GB Dual Channel DDR (soon to be 2GB) and a 128MB FX5900 (soon to be a 256MB factory over-clocked FX5950Ultra (if I'm brave enough to see what the nvidia restricted drivers do under Ubuntu if you replace the gfx card)))

DaddyHoggy wrote:

If it works under Ubuntu then I may well give it a whirl ( I have a comparable CPU and memory and a bit better gfx card - XP2800+, 1GB Dual Channel DDR (soon to be 2GB) and a 128MB FX5900 (soon to be a 256MB factory over-clocked FX5950Ultra (if I'm brave enough to see what the nvidia restricted drivers do under Ubuntu if you replace the gfx card)))

I think it's WinPC only, but since the source-code is available, maybe it would be possible to port. (or something comparable may be available, I haven't looked yet) I fired up my Kubuntu 8.04 install, (dual-booted on the same machine) tonight and it picked up the new card and installed drivers automagically.. then I fired up Synaptic and grabbed the nVidia configuration panel so I could play with screen gamma, etc, but didn't go for the latest Linux drivers from nVidia because the 'uninstall old drivers and related stuff' routine for Kubuntu looks more than a little daunting. However, the auto-installed drivers run well, and my shaders are working too.

Diziet Sma wrote:

The only real reason I haven't installed YAH is because of the crashing-into-billboards-on-exiting-witchspace issue.

It's fairly easy to hack YAH to not turn the witchspace beacons into billboards... I've hacked mine to give me the various constores with all the adds but without replacing beacons with billboards.

Cool!! 21 hours after the original post, 118 viewings of the post, of which many are repeats by DH and myself (probably others also), and the vid has already had 42 viewings, and is rated 4 and a half stars!

I'm suitably thrilled with that!



Edit:
It finally occurred to me to watch the Youtube vid in full-screen High Definition mode.. now THAT'S more like what the vid I recorded looks like! Dunno why I didn't think of the HD version before...

Indeed!

Your experiences with Kubuntu have given me some hope that all will be well if I just rip out the 5900XT and put in the meatier 5950U.

Irrespective of that, I do actually have an XP install (blows dust off it to make sure it still works) and I could put Oolite on it along with YAH and Camstudio for a bit of video creation...

**

Off-topic - YAH since to be less utilised than I'd hoped mainly due to the crashing at the witchpoint problem (which I've never had - but then I don't have time to play much) - which leads me to ask the question (I may have to ask elsewhere for full exposure) - is there a simple way in the OXP description to rescale the WS billboard so that it's the same size as the Nav-buoy variant and thus reduce the chances of pranging/dying?

Wheee!! 100th viewing today!!! and now rated 5 stars!

Dizzy is happy...


@ DH.. how did that 5950U work out?

Diziet Sma wrote:

Wheee!! 100th viewing today!!! and now rated 5 stars!

Dizzy is happy...


@ DH.. how did that 5950U work out?

5950U still in its wrapper - having some problem in RL(tm) with a "neighbour from hell" - PC may soon be used for streaming live CCTV of her behaviour on to the internet...