Oolite Bulletins

After looking at some of the wonderful ships from neolite, griff and others, I thought I'd take a stab at making a few myself. I primarily model in Wings3D and SketchUp for 3D and use the GIMP for 2D work.

I have a number of the "original" Elite ships in both .3ds and .x formats, converted to .obj for Wings3D without scaling.

My question: is the "scale" of the original Elite ships the same for Oolite? Or, are modelers scaling to say, 1 Wings unit = 10m for reference and then scaling the model equally on all 3 axis when ready to import into Oolite. I've noticed the imported .obj files generally dwarf the grid in Wings3D already so there isn't a convenient reference point to measure from.

Hope this post makes sense.

Cheers.

I believe that the Oolite ships use metres instead of feet. And consequently they are bigger, but don't quote me on that!!

Can't you load an Oolite ship and then alongside it also load one of your Elite ships ?
I only know a different 3d program (Metasequoia) and to load another object along the one you are building, to verify if in-game sizes will fit (and position, different game) - this is the easiest way to go.

Hi snork... actually, I was just thinking about that when you posted. I'll convert an existing Oolite ship like the CMk.III and an original. I can import them both into Wings3D and make the comparison...

Cheers.

[EDIT] Found an easier way... converting the .obj using Obj2DatTex.py added a line with the model dimensions to the .dat file. So...

The original Elite Cobra Mk.III is 190.000 x 30.000 x 90.010

The Oolite CMk.III redux is 130.000 x 30.000 x 65.000

neolite's CMk.III is 100.000 x 15.809 x 46.392

The original Elite ship is a bit on the large size but it looks like there's room enough to do some scaling without much worry...

Thanks for the help guys!

SiriusCG wrote:

Hi snork... actually, I was just thinking about that when you posted. I'll convert an existing Oolite ship like the CMk.III and an original. I can import them both into Wings3D and make the comparison...

Cheers.

[EDIT] Found an easier way... converting the .obj using Obj2DatTex.py added a line with the model dimensions to the .dat file. So...

The original Elite Cobra Mk.III is 190.000 x 30.000 x 90.010

The Oolite CMk.III redux is 130.000 x 30.000 x 65.000

neolite's CMk.III is 100.000 x 15.809 x 46.392

The original Elite ship is a bit on the large size but it looks like there's room enough to do some scaling without much worry...

Thanks for the help guys!

The scaling in Oolite is completely arbitary - pods are too large, planets, suns and stations too small - it's all about gameplay - so all I can do is reiterate what has been said by numerous other model makers - decide how big your ship is going to be compared to another ship in the game (i.e. a bit bigger than a Cobra MkIII, same length as an Anaconda etc...), build your ship in whatever scale you want, and then drop it in to the game - if it's too big make it smaller, if its too small make it bigger.

That's it - anything else will lead to hair tearing, frustration and accusations that scale in Oolite is bonkers (which it is)

Look forward to seeing your ships.

Good luck

Just to confirm: at the end of the day the sizes and dimensions are quite arbitrary, and what counts is what is working in gameplay.

If you have a look at the dimensions of some objects in Oolite (the station dock is an important reference, for instance) and see how big they look in comparison to each other, you will get an idea of how big you want to make your model.

One Wings3d unit translates into 1 meter in the game.

You will feel that the ships are generally oversized, if you only have a look at the numbers, but they need that size simply in order to be visible on the screen. You wouldn't want to invest a lot of time in creating a wonderfully detailed model of an object five or ten meters long, when for a normal player during normal gameplay it would be reduced to only two or three pixels most of the time. That would be spoiling your design efforts.

Commander McLane wrote:

...an object five or ten meters long...

And when you do make them that small it doesn't look right, it makes them look like they're very far away when you're right up close to them, that happened with my Eagles OXP, I forgot to about the scale and when I put it in game at first i thought it was invisible, then I saw a tiny spec in the distance, only it wasn't in the distance

One Wings3d unit translates into 1 meter in the game.

Ah... that's good to know. Also knowing that scale needs to be "tweaked" to allow for in-game rendering makes sense. You gents will have saved me some "head knocking against a wall" moments, thanks for the tips!

Cheers.