Oolite Bulletins

I have a suggestion that I think would enhance the Oolite experience and one that has bugged me ever since I took a computer graphics class:

When viewing a planet, the direction of the planet's lighting is almost never coming from the direction of the sun. Each planet in a system has it's own light source, and they never match. 'One-source' lighting, or at least a consistent lighting direction, would fix this.

Reasons for: 1)It would really enhance the immersive element of the game and 2) players would be able to orient their ship visually in relation to the planet and the sun by just seeing the planet's shadowing.

Reasons against: 1) Lighting is left up to OXP developers and each is different, 2) code makes it a major overhaul.

I don't know how hard this would be, especially over a system ( I use FarSun, SystemRedux, and orbits.oxp) but I'd be willing to put some effort into it if it's feasible...

I think the development for this has been done, I think it will be in the next version.

It should also be noted that it is certain OXPs repositioning the sun that make this bug evident. Normally, the sun position and the lighting source coincide. FarSun is one such OXP. In any case, this is fixed in trunk, as Cmdr James said.

Please don’t use polls for simple bug/feature request posts. It doesn’t achieve anything.

I believe you are mistaken. The in-system light does AFAIK come from the sun. You can easily see that the side of your ship pointing to the sun is lit, and the side pointing away from it isn't. The same applies for planets and other objects.

However, there is also the ambient_light setting in planetinfo.plist. This determines how bright the non-lit sides of objects (like planets) are. The higher the value, the brighter they are, which gives a cartoonish effect.

It seems that you have System Redux installed, which sets the ambient light to a relatively high value for all systems. Therefore the solution to your problem is not to re-program Oolite's light sources, but to simply change the ambientlight setting in your copy of System Redux to a lower value (try lower than the default, and everything but the directly sunlit parts will be very dark).

You find all the necessary information here: http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Planetinfo.plist

tenfishsticks wrote:

( I use FarSun, SystemRedux, and orbits.oxp) but I'd be willing to put some effort into it if it's feasible...

As others already said: this is fixed for 1.74. Planets and ships were (and are) always lit from a singly point in the system: the sun position. However, moving the sun did not move that light source. So farsun.oxp does move the sun further away but not the light origin. Head for the sun and when passing the old sun position you will see the light coming from behind.
This is already fixed in trunk. Light now always follows the sun position.

Sorry, I'm new to Oolite and thought this was a standard problem. It appears it is just for me, though! I'm going to start a discussion in the help section, because I get a strong planet lighting from a different direction from each planet. It's not ambient lighting, which I've turned down to zero.

Any suggestions there would be appreciated!

You can test what it looks like without FarSun.oxp. This is known to move the sun position and makes the problem happen. Also, try removing Orbits.oxp if you have it installed, for pretty much the same reason.

It looks as if it's a problem with Orbits. here is the discussion:

https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?p=99230#99230