Oolite Bulletins

Hi everyone!

My first post here. Thanks to everyone who has made this such a fantastic game, I've had hours of fun. & everyone else too for creating such a great community. Been lurking here a lot.

So-o... I'm running the Linux version 1.73.4 with a few oxps. Random hits has provided lots of fun & great cobat skill development. I just completed the Constrictor mission & am dangerous in Galaxy Two. Wahay!

I've been reading up on textures & skins & it seemed that it would be pretty straightforward to re-skin my Imperial Courier. But it doesn't seem to take. I hold down shift on starting the game to no avail.

Is all the information used to create the ship in-game held in the impcourier2.oxp folder? If not, where else?

The textures are in:

~/.Oolite/AddOns/impcourier2.oxp/Textures/

& they are all png:

icour_engine_nav_tex.png 256x256
icour_engine_tex.png 256x256
imp_cour_nav_tex.png 512x512
imp_cour_tex.png 512x512

Navy issue white, user issue, grey.

So I back them up & then play about with these files in The Gimp, but in the game the ship stays the same uniform grey.

Can anyone offer any advice on what I should try next?

With thanks & a derrry- dol me darlings

Tom B.

It shouldn't be a uniform grey - it should be a sort of off-white with blue bits on it and a blue canopy at the front.

A bit like this:



Something may be wrong with your GFX card? Tech guys??

Ya if you could post a SS of it in game it would help, cause it's not very clear if you're seeing them as the original textures or as one uniform monotone colour.

Although if you're seeing the original textures after retexturing them, I'd call your local church, cause you've just found a miracle!
I think you can retexture an item and have it appear in game Without holding shift as long as the texture path is unchanged.

If you're seeing one uniform monotone colour for your ship, it's your graphic card being unable to handle it, It must be a very old graphcs card not to be able to handle a 512x512 diffuse map without any shaders though... so I doubt thats the case.

You need to make the new texture file has the same name as the texture file the model dat is pointing towards. Even the smallest difference will mean it doesn't work.

Basically give your new texture the same name as whatever the original texture was and it should work. Oh yeah and delete the original texture.

...and the log should tell you if it failed to load a texture file. If memory serves me well, a uniform, featureless grey is the 'blank' texture, used by oolite if the real texture file couldn't be found.

Lower & upper case does make a difference with linux (and macs, sometimes - in case a mac owner has a similar problem)

PS: and a belated welcome to this, one of the friendliest forums this side of Riedquat!

Kaks wrote:

...and the log should tell you if it failed to load a texture file. If memory serves me well, a uniform, featureless grey is the 'blank' texture, used by oolite if the real texture file couldn't be found.

Lower & upper case does make a difference with linux (and macs, sometimes - in case a mac owner has a similar problem)

PS: and a belated welcome to this, one of the friendliest forums this side of Riedquat!

Kaks is right (of course) I've had a few textures no-show under linux because they'd been saved as "texture-foo.PNG" which worked on my XP machine but not on my Ubuntu one!

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Kaks wrote:

Lower & upper case does make a difference with linux (and macs, sometimes - in case a mac owner has a similar problem)

Kaks is right (of course) I've had a few textures no-show under linux because they'd been saved as "texture-foo.PNG" which worked on my XP machine but not on my Ubuntu one!

Yes, make sure that the whole of the filename matches, including the file extension, .png instead of .PNG.

Thanks everyone!

Maybe I didn't explain very well.

The file names are identical I just carefully repainted one or two bits.

I press v a few times & the external view shows the ship just as it was before, as in Selezen's screenshot. Not a mysterious blank.

I'm on my lappy right now & I'll check for capitals tomorrow, but I'm pretty sure that's not it!

I'm not thinking miracles here ADCK, just that my changed files have been bypassed or ignored. Any ideas?

..but... it's impossible, if you have changed the original pic.

Oolite doesn't store images in some database or anything, if the original pic is overwritten it should be gone forever. Period. There's no way Oolite could remember a texture that no longer exists.

Sorry if this is patronizing, but have you checked the file permissions on the modified texture (since you're running linux)?

It may be that you have GIMP running with permission to write, yet Oolite without permission to read the modified texture.

Hi everyone,

Not patronising Poro, you're trying to be helpful. I'm not a total linux newb, but you were right to suggest it. However, if it were a permissions issue I wouldn't have been able to save the changed files in the first place.
So I repeated the experiment.

Texture files before (screen shot)


Texture files after


I just painted a big red dot underneath.

External view of ship after change (shift held) I'm using the Medusa HUD btw.



Sorry ADCK, as far as I can see it's not impossible. The question is how is it possible? I've repeated the experiment a number of times now. Deleting & re-installing the oxp each time so that I don't compound any error.

Nb the new png is now smaller. The Gimp has a lot of png saving options, but even if the file were somehow changed in a way which meant that the game [rejected it], where would it have got a copy of the original version?

BTW they're all bog standard rgb files.

Later -- cracked it!

Think outside the box! I deleted the oxp & restarted without it, holding down shift. I was expecting that I would default to a Cobra III or my previous ship model or something but strangely I still had an Imperial Courier. ADCK I'm grateful for your input. You were right, of course but it was a question of how does this impossible thing happen? (!) The only solution was that the Imp. Cou. oxp data was being read from somewhere else. In the add-ons folder! I tried all the extra ship oxps then discovered it hiding inside Random Hits! These were the textures being used all along. The folder whose contents I was changing was being ignored.

Thank you all! Now I can re-skin my ship. When it's done I'll post it!

Fall far and fare well, Pilots!
Tom B

That screenshot looks weird. I'm pretty sure the nacelles are not supposed to spin like that.

I think it's an artefact of some kind, they look ok in-game. Ta!

Tom Bombadil wrote:

Think outside the box! I deleted the oxp & restarted without it, holding down shift. I was expecting that I would default to a Cobra III or my previous ship model or something but strangely I still had an Imperial Courier. ADCK I'm grateful for your input. You were right, of course but it was a question of how does this impossible thing happen? (!) The only solution was that the Imp. Cou. oxp data was being read from somewhere else. In the add-ons folder! I tried all the extra ship oxps then discovered it hiding inside Random Hits! These were the textures being used all along. The folder whose contents I was changing was being ignored.

Hmmm! So this brings up the question, does RH replace Imperial Courier OXP? Or merely supplements it?

Would removing IC.OXP mean that you wouldn't get Couriers as normal pirates, but only meet them as part of RH missions?

JazHaz wrote:

Hmmm! So this brings up the question, does RH replace Imperial Courier OXP?

No, it doesn't, by no means. It simply uses the Imperial Courier as a possible hit. But because Random Hits.oxp cannot know whether Imperial Courier.oxp is installed on the player's computer, it comes with a copy of the ship. (And by the way, it comes with copies of a lot more ships than only the IC.)

The copy is exactly that: a faithful copy of the IC. Therefore it doesn't matter that it "overwrites" the original. Only if you change one of the two (the first one which Oolite loads into memory, to be recise) you could know it.

JazHaz wrote:

Would removing IC.OXP mean that you wouldn't get Couriers as normal pirates, but only meet them as part of RH missions?

Exactly. You only ever would see it as a possible mark. Like you see other ships as possible marks, even if you haven't installed their OXPs.

The alternative would be for Random Hits to copy the IC, but give it a different name (putting "RH_" in front of all file names and identifiers would be enough). Then it would become completely independent of IC.oxp. This would be better style, because it would allow to author of the original OXP to make changes to his model, and not have them erased again by another OXP. The disadvantage would be that, if the original IC.oxp would be changed, there would suddenly be two different versions of the IC: one as its author revised it, and one as a relic in Random Hits. As it is now, you would always only get the relic.