Oolite Bulletins

Oolite test release 1.74 We’re Getting There, or Somewhere at Least Edition is now available from GURPO.

Compatibility testing

For this release, we have developed a compatibility test suite for graphics cards. We would like as many people as possible to test this on as many systems as possible.

Changes since test release 1.73.4

Gameplay

• With the Advanced Navigation Array you can now see the fastest (as opposed to shortest) route by pressing control-shift-6 (Mac: control-^).
• Mouse control (full screen mode only) can be enabled with a yaw-and-pitch flight model by pressing control-shift-M. (As before, shift-M will use a roll-pitch model.)
• The ECM alarm no longer goes of while you’re docked.
• The “Missile/Mine armed” message now specifies what type of missile/mine it is.
• Greatly improved traffic control dialogues.
• Speech synthesis is now available on all platforms.
• Improved behaviour on various menu screens.
• When dying, the last saved game is now reloaded. (In strict mode, the game restarts.)
• Auto-saves are now named “Commander Name (autosave)” instead of just “autosave”. There is no auto-save immediately after restarting.

Graphics

• The default shader mode is now Full except on first-generation shader-capable systems. Full shader mode will be disabled on some or all of those systems in future, but is currently enabled for testing purposes.
• [Mac] Enabled “Detailed Planets” option.
• Flashers and particle effects look better. Very large flashers no longer pop into view at unexpectedly close range.
• Reduced aliasing artefacts (“twinkling”) in star field and distant flashers/particles.
• Many of the built-in ships have been edited to fix minor lighting issues.
• Light maps are now supported in shaderless mode (on systems that support “texture combiners”).
• Improved specular highlights in shaderless mode on most systems.
• Hyperspace and dock tunnels look different.
• [Linux] Fixed tearing issues (v-sync).
• Shader mode changes now take effect immediately.
• “Pink oceans” are no longer a lie.

Bug fixes

• Lasers now hit the right shield, even if they happen to be fired by subentities.
• No more messages about broken equipment, lost targets and so forth after you die.
• Fixed lighting issues for objects with shaders, notably demo screen and shipyard lighting, and shadows.
• Fixed blocked docking queue when ships in the queue die.
• The game now distinguishes between overlapping systems properly.
• Hot ships now dump hot cargo (and escape pods).
• Ships can no longer be sold with both types of energy unit (the regular one is removed).
• Cargo bay extensions now work again as expected.
• [Mac] Full screen mode is once again restored when relaunching as appropriate.
• [Mac] No longer freezes indefinitely while waiting for iTunes to respond if, say, you have a dialog box open in iTunes.
• Collisions are now reported to both ships involved.
• It is now possible to use the same mesh with and without smoothing.
• Callbacks passed to Oolite JavaScript methods can now access variables in the enclosing context.
• JavaScript scripts can no longer survive the transition to strict mode (except by attaching themselves to the debug console).
• Lots of boring little crashes, log messages and things. Many lots.

Known bugs

• Planets’ axes of rotation can now be messed up in several new ways. There is still no un-messed-up option. (Bug #17243)
• Scooping is too hard. (Bug #17245)
• Exhaust plumes jump around stupidly after a jump. (Bug #17246)
• New substitution dictionary parameter to expandDescription()/expandMissionText() has lower priority than description.plist entries, should be higher. (Bug #17193)
• Overlays and underlays have a fixed resolution and interact badly with texture rescaling. (Bug #17201, technically old)
• Shot cycle times depend on the last weapon fired, not the currently selected weapon. (Bug #17240, old)
• Scanner markers appear in the wrong place for one frame when summoning an NPC ship. (Bug #17215, old)
• When overriding a market system-wide (“market” entry in planetinfo.plist), the specified market is applied to all stations in the system, not just the main station as was most likely intended. (Bug #17247, old)
• [Mac] Occasional bursts of very loud noise, causing the system to compensate by lowering effective volume. (Bug #17214, old)

Remember, if it isn’t in the bug tracker, we officially don’t know about it.


Miscellaneous

• Decreased memory usage, primarily for flashers and textures.
• The log file is a bit more readable.
• [Mac and Windows] Add-ons, log and screen shots can now be found through menus.
• Added support for working around specific 3D hardware issues. In particular, the default shader setting is now hardware-dependent, and point and line smoothing are disabled on some hardware.
• [Mac] Oolite now requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
• [Mac] Oolite is now 64-bit clean in Mac OS X 10.6.
• [Windows and Linux]: Screenshots are now saved in PNG format.

OXP/scripting

• New mission screen model: use mission.runScreen(), ignore everything else. Generally, use missionScreenOpportunity() event to run mission screens. Several of the old mission properties and methods are deprecated. See this thread for details.
• All ships now have “real” equipment that can be manipulated through scripts, not just the player. Several new equipment-related methods and properties have been added. Damage status is separated from equipment type (no more _DAMAGED suffixes in JavaScript). ship.hasEquipment() has been deprecated.
• Script state no longer persists when the game resets/reloads. In particular, the reset() event is gone; instead, scripts are reloaded from scratch and startUp() is called again. Also, the ability to create “persistent” timers that survived resets is gone.
• Background and overlay images: can be set with screenbackground.plist or setScreenBackground() and setScreenOverlay() functions.
• Whitelisting is now fully in effect: unpermitted methods in legacy scripts, AIs or HUD dial definitions will be ignored.
• The “homebrew” plist parser has been removed.
• Ship.remove() now takes an optional boolean parameter, suppressDeathEvent. If true, the ship will not be sent a shipDied() event (and death_actions will not fire.) A new event, shipRemoved(), is sent regardless (before shipDied()).
• The shipLaunchedFromStation() event now passes the station as a parameter.
• New context string for shipDied(): “cascade weapon”.
• JS timers stop if their callback’s “this” object (the first parameter to the constructor) dies.
• expandDescription() and the new expandMissionText() can optionally be passed a dictionary of substitution pairs, as in: expandDescription("My ball is [my_color].", { "my_color": "red" }); Bug: at the moment, description.plist values take precedence. In 1.74.1, this will be reversed.
• Ship models can now include per-vertex normals, so you can import models with smooth parts directly from a real live 3D editor. Unfortunately tangent generation for such files is completely broken, so they can’t be normal mapped at the moment.
• Flashers are now taken into account when determining a ship’s cull distance. This means ships with ridiculous giant flashers are now seen from much further away. It also means they affect performance from much further away. Also, distant flashers fade out rather than suddenly disappearing.
• Player ships with player-only shader bindings can now be displayed on the demo screen and shipyard screen without causing errors. (The same fix also applies to the doppelganger created when the player ejects.)
• Ship “personality” numbers and “random” shader uniforms are now generated in a consistent fashion for the player, and transferred from the display model when buying ships. This means player ship shaders can usefully use “random” parameters.
• Cube map textures are now supported – especially useful for, but not limited to, planets.
• Greyscale+alpha PNG textures are now supported.
• Changes to material model: renamed diffuse, specular, ambient and emission to diffuse_color, specular_color, ambient_color and emission_color. (The old names are still supported for compatibility.) Added specular_modulate_color and emission_modulate_color, and added illumination_modulate_color; these are used to recolour the corresponding texture maps (specular and emission used to do this, but are now only used when there’s no texture map). See this post for details.
• It is now possible for a texture to be specified as a specific channel of a file, as in { name = "my_texture.png"; extract_channel = "r"; };. This comes with some overhead, but makes it easy to reuse channels of shader effect maps as emission or illumination maps in non-shader mode.
• Shaders no longer have implicit tex0, tex1 etc. uniforms. Easily fixed: uniforms = ( tex0 = { type = "texture"; value = 0; }, … );
• Subentities and flashers can now be specified as dictionaries instead of non-descriptive strings.
• Flashers with a frequency of 0 now always have full intensity. (Previously, it was always 0.5.)
• Using the new dictionary-type definition, flashers can now be any colour. They can also take an array of colours and switch between them in sequence. Use black to create intermittent flashers.
• Ship radar marker colours can be specified in shipdata.plist as scanner_display_color1 and scanner_display_color2, and in JavaSCript as scannerDisplayColor1 and scannerDisplayColor2.
• The ship property cargo_carried can now be set to “SCARCE_GOODS” or “PLENTIFUL_GOODS”. The selected goods then depend on the prices at the local market.
• Improved missile HUD icons. Outlines are now of consistent thickness. Arbitrary concave and complex (self-intersecting) polygons are supported, and more than one contour may be used (by specifying an array of arrays). To maximise compatibility with existing missiles, the relatively obscure Positive polygon winding rule is used; you can punch holes by using polygons with opposite winding order to the first one. Convex corners are bevelled at 30° or sharper angles. For troubleshooting, use the polygon-sprite-dump-svg hidden setting.
• Support for HUD “dial” for joystick sensitivity, drawStickSensitivityIndicator:. See comment in hud.plist.
• HUD elements can be adapted to window aspect ratio using the new x_origin and y_origin properties. -1 is bottom/left, 1 is top/right, 0 (default) is centre.
• HUD elements can have their alpha modified individually.
• New OXPMessages.plist to put notifications on the startup screen.
• New generate-ai-graphviz hidden preference to dump flow control graphs for AIs.
• NPC missiles are now associated with equipment types (so that appropriate EquipmentInfo objects can be used to describe them). If no equipment.plist entry exists, an EquipmentInfo will be synthesised as needed.
• Carrier AIs now receive DOCKING_REQUESTED and DOCKING_COMPLETE messages in connection with docking clearance requests.
• New CARGO_DUMPED AI message.
• Overheating behaviour changed as per this thread.
• Giving player a trumble may fail if they already have some.
• Better error reporting in various situations.

New world events:

• compassTargetChanged()
• guiScreenWillChange()
• missionScreenOpportunity()
• shipSpawned() (Sent immediately after ship event of the same name)

New ship events:

• shipCloakActivated()
• shipCloakDeactivated()
• shipRemoved()
• shipTargetDestroyed() – replaces shipDestroyedTarget()
• shipTargetLost() – replaces shipLostTarget()

New JavaScript properties and methods:

• expandMissionText()
• setScreenBackground()
• setScreenOverlay()
• clock.addSeconds()
• console.displayFPS
• console.glVendorString
• console.glRendererString
• console.glFixedFunctionTextureUnitCount
• console.glFragmentShaderTextureUnitCount
• console.platformDescription
• console.shaderMode
• console.writeLogMarker()
• equipmentInfo.scriptInfo
• EquipmentInfo.allEquipment
• mission.setInstructions
• mission.runScreen()
• oolite.gameSettings
• planet.texture
• planet.orientation
• playerShip.addPassenger()
• playerShip.awardContract()
• playerShip.awardEquipmentToCurrentPylon()
• playerShip.compassMode
• playerShip.compassTarget
• playerShip.engageAutoPilotToStation()
• playerShip.disengageAutoPilot()
• playerShip.hud
• playerShip.hudHidden
• playerShip.manifest
• playerShip.targetSystem
• ship.abandonShip()
• ship.aftWeapon
• ship.awardEquipment() (replaces playerShip.awardEquipment())
• ship.canAwardEquipment()
• ship.cargoSpaceAvailable
• ship.cargoSpaceCapacity
• ship.contracts
• ship.equipment
• ship.equipmentStatus() (replaces playerShip.equipmentStatus())
• ship.exitSystem()
• ship.fireMissile() (NPCs only)
• ship.forwardWeapon
• ship.fuelChargeRate
• ship.isCargo
• ship.isDerelict
• ship.isMissile
• ship.isMine
• ship.isRock
• ship.isBoulder
• ship.isWeapon
• ship.lightsActive
• ship.maxThrust
• ship.missileCapacity
• ship.missiles
• ship.passengers
• ship.portWeapon
• ship.removeEquipment() (replaces playerShip.removeEquipment())
• ship.savedCoordinates
• ship.scannerDisplayColor1
• ship.scannerDisplayColor2
• ship.selectNewMissile()
• ship.setCargo()
• ship.setEquipmentStatus() (replaces playerShip.setEquipmentStatus())
• ship.setMaterials()
• ship.setShaders()
• ship.starboardWeapon
• ship.thrust
• ship.thrustVector
• ship.velocity
• station.dockedContractors
• station.dockedDefenders
• station.dockedPolice
• station.equipmentPriceFactor
• station.launchDefenseShip()
• station.launchMiner()
• station.launchPatrol()
• station.launchPolice()
• station.launchScavenger()
• station.launchShuttle()
• station.launchShipWithRole()
• station.suppressArrivalReports
• system.addGroup()
• system.addGroupToRoute()
• system.addShips()
• system.addShipsToRoute()
• systemInfo.coordinates
• systemInfo.galaxyID
• systemInfo.systemID
• systemInfo.distanceToSystem()
• systemInfo.routeToSystem()
• SystemInfo.filteredSystems()

Deprecated JavaScript properties and methods:

• mission.choice – convert to mission.runScreen().
• mission.runMissionScreen() – convert to mission.runScreen().
• mission.showShipModel() – convert to mission.runScreen().
• mission.setBackgroundImage() – convert to mission.runScreen().
• mission.setMusic() – convert to mission.runScreen().
• mission.setChoicesKey() – convert to mission.runScreen().
• mission.clearMissionScreen() – convert to mission.runScreen().
• planet.setTexture() – assign to planet.texture instead.
• player.hasEquipment() – use equipmentStatus() instead.
• playerShip.awardCargo() – assign to manifest entry instead (e.g. playerShip.manifest["Food"] += 3).
• ship.availableCargoSpace – use ship.cargoSpaceAvailable instead.
• ship.cargoCapacity – use ship.cargoSpaceCapacity instead.
• timer.isPersistent – no replacement.

New/modified shipdata keys:

• auto_ai (fuzzy boolean, default: true): now applies to escorts.
• cloak_passive (boolean, default false): if true, ship’s cloak is disabled when firing weapons.
• debris_role (role, default “boulder” or “splinter”): specifies the type of debris generated when an asteroid or boulder breaks up.
• docking_pattern_model (DAT file name): replace docking effect model (see the rock hermit for an example).
• has_scoop_message (boolean, default true): if false, the standard “<something> scooped.” message is suppressed when this ship is scooped.
• market (commodities.plist key): for carriers, specifies the commodity market to use.
• max_missiles (number, default: same value as “missiles”): now applies to NPC ships.
• missile_load_time (number, default 0): specifies the minimum interval between missile shots.
• scanner_display_color1, scanner_display_color2 (colour specifiers, default: depends on scan class): see above.
• Inconsistent shipdata keys “escort-role”, “escort-ship”, “hasShipyard”, “isCarrier” and “scanClass” have been supplemented with idiomatic “escort_role”, “escort_ship”, “has_shipyard”, “is_carrier” and “scan_class”. If both are present, the new one is used. like_ship merging does the right thing.

New AI commands:

• checkAegis
• checkEnergy
• setCoordinatesFromPosition
• setThrustFactorTo:

I was getting worried about the lack of Linux announcement!

Will download tomorrow, erm, later today

Tomorrow night, erm, later today I'll post the AMD64(i.e. x86_64) version.

1.74 for AMD64 (i.e. x86_64) architecture is released.

Debian packages are now also available from the repository for the following distributions:

• Debian 5.04 - 'lenny'
• Ubuntu 8.04 LTS 'hardy'
• Ubuntu 9.04 'jaunty'
• Ubuntu 9.10 'karmic'

There is no specific package for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 'lucid' considering the ongoing GNUstep issues for this, so please use the autopackage version.
Of course, the autopackage version can also be used for any of the above distributions instead of the deb-package version - there is no need to change if you're already using the autopackage version.