Oolite Bulletins

Some ships get different external views, or even none at all.
But it varies.
There are times when only one external view is available, for all ships.
That view is from below, towards the front, as though the ship is about to fly past you on an upward trajectory. Something like a statue of Lenin gazing into the future, heroically, done in spaceship.

I have externalviews.oxp installed.

Is this normal?

From the Wiki OXP page entry for externalviews.oxp..

Warning: Do not use with Oolite 1.70 and above! From Oolite 1.70 onwards improved outside views have been added to the game itself, so you don't need this OXP anymore. Just throw it away.

Could be that is the reason you sometimes get strange external view problems..

No; I have 1.65

Nothing with a .7x in it will run on my iMac for more than a few seconds. I have read similar comments from Other User somewhere.

But since many ships DO have their own external views, I will take the OXP out & see what happens.

EDIT scoop camera on PythonClassCruiser still fine

Ok.. according to the Wiki, externalviews.oxp should only affect the Classic ships, which is to say, the ones built in to the game... hmmm...

A ship will only have external views if the writer set them up in shipdata for his particular ship. As external views only came in with 1.65 onwards many older ships don't have them at all, as they didn't exist when the writer wrote the ship. It could be a bug with the particular ship as the author has to set up the co-ordinates for the camera view for each view or it could be intended to look that way. You can set up as many different view points as you like for a given ship, so each ship has different external views.

When OSE comes out, any and all player ships will have external views, including those that didn't have them in their original oxps due to, well LB said it, having been written for an Oolite version from before 1.65.

Thanks all for your comments.
The "single-view" external view only occurs sometimes, at other times there is no external view available and sometimes - usually - there is a full range of external views as per the ship design.

The PCC scoop camera is particularly good.

The section about the Bug report contains a thread about floating point exception. In that thread there's a ship that had its external views fitted with Lestradae help.

You can also search the messages for a psychedelic TIE to find Lestradae original suggestion.

As pointed out before, external views are not a standard feature of ships. They have to be defined.

As you are playing with 1.65, all the ships of the basic set have already done that. This means all ships that come with Oolite itself, not ships from OXPs.

Externalviews.oxp just gives you different (better) viewpoints for the ships of the basic set. It was incorporated into a later version, which is why you don't need it anymore with the latest test-versions of Oolite. The difference is that the viewpoints in "vanilla" 1.65 were defined too close to the ship. As a result you see only parts of the ship, but these parts fill half the screen. Externalviews.oxp fixes this specific problem, making the ships fit better on the screen.

Externalviews.oxp does nothing at all to any ship which is not a member of the basic set. Therefore it does nothing to a PCC, which comes to you through PCC.oxp.

So there are two possibilities: Either the author of that OXP has definied external views for the PCC analogous to the external views of the original ships, or he hasn't. If he hasn't, there are no extenral views for the ship. If he has, he was completely free to choose any number and position of views, from one external view only, to the eight views in 1.65, to the ten views in externalviews.oxp, to millions of views (I would not suggest to incorporate millions of external views for one ship, as it could become a little boring the cycle through them, and there is no other way to get back to the first view; but technically it should be possible).

If you want external views for a ship that doesn't have that feature, the easy step-by-step guide is as follows:

1. Open externalviews.oxp.
2. Open the file called shipdata.plist inside its Config-folder.
3. Find a ship-definition of a ship that roughly resembles your ship in size.
4. Copy the complete custom_views-array from that definition, down to the closing </array>.
5. Paste it into the shipdata-definition of your ship of choice. It doesn't matter where you paste it, as long as you don't get in-between a <key>blabla</key> and its <string>blabla</string> or <integer>blabla</integer>.
6. Save the amended shipdata.plist.
7. Restart Oolite. Now the freshly defined external views for your ship should be available.