Oolite Bulletins

I managed to get a video of Oolite into one of my Lectures!

Quite easy in the end (should have thought of it before). US Army used modified Battlezone (c. 1980) to train Bradley drivers. Battlezone was wireframe and had no hidden surface removal. Mid-80s on Home computers of the time along comes Elite - still wireframe but this time with hidden surface removal now to Oolite with procedural textured planets, surface textures, shading, lighting, etc etc - run a video of each to show the progression!

Nice job.

IIRC the hidden surface removal used a particular cunning algorithm with some limitations. Ever noticed the lack of convex surfaces on the original ships?

"I'll get back to the lecture in a minute guys, can't you see I'm getting my ass shot off by pirates?"

zevans wrote:

IIRC the hidden surface removal used a particular cunning algorithm with some limitations. Ever noticed the lack of convex surfaces on the original ships?

It's more basic than that even - ever notice how you can see other objects which are further away through a closer object?

Basically all they did was not draw the lines making up the boundaries of the surfaces which were facing away from the camera. Still, pretty good for the hardware at the time.

The way you do it is you encode the vertices of each surface in a particular direction - say clockwise (this has to be consistent across every model). Then when you look at the surface from the 'camera', if the vertices are in the wrong direction (anti-clockwise in our example), you simply don't render it as it's facing the other way. Which works fine for convex models such as all the original Elite ships.

These days it gets a lot more complicated with normal calculations and all the rest to determine what gets displayed and how it gets coloured. Luckily the hardware and high-level libraries such as GL already do most of the grunt work for us.

All true (and as a Lecturer in Defence Simulation and Modelling you're preaching to the converted) - but the point was to come up with a bonafide reason to put an Oolite video in a Lecture and present it to a room full of army majors.


MissionSuccess = TRUE

So, what did the majors think of Oolite?

another_commander wrote:

So, what did the majors think of Oolite?

"I remember this - but I don't remember it looking like that!" and later (one or two clandestine visitations post-lecture) "erm, that video you showed, you say its free to download..."

Excellent DH, excellent.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

another_commander wrote:

So, what did the majors think of Oolite?

"I remember this - but I don't remember it looking like that!" and later (one or two clandestine visitations post-lecture) "erm, that video you showed, you say its free to download..."

MissionSuccess = MAJOR (pun intended)

You're missing a pimp opp there DH, you need to have a ship/station designed w/ strategic workplace logos, then when people ask that question you can "just happen" to have pre-burnt CDs available for them. if they get hooked they'll be seeing your creations/logos all the time!

Killer Wolf wrote:

You're missing a pimp opp there DH, you need to have a ship/station designed w/ strategic workplace logos, then when people ask that question you can "just happen" to have pre-burnt CDs available for them. if they get hooked they'll be seeing your creations/logos all the time!

+1

Best I can do is draw pictures of oolite in my math notebook (With the radar, shield and energy bars and everything)