Oolite Bulletins

Great game, but as one adds scanner capabilities and spacey eye-candy, I feel the display starts to get too crowded.

It works, mind you. The game plays very well. But the density one can end up with on the HUD somehow seems to me to rob the game of some of it's feel of vastness. If the scanner and maybe the gauges and missile display could be broken out and sent to another machine and monitor, it could give more of a sense of it having a main viewscreen and an instrument panel. It would allow for developing instrument panels that might range anywhere from fairly simple to some serious eye-candy.

Even an old clunker machine (so long as it could connect via LAN) with an old 12 inch CRT monitor could handle most Oolite instrument displays if that's all it had to do, and it might also free up some resources for the FPS rate on the main screen.

It's not something everybody would want, I'm sure. A lot of people like Oolite for being compact when they run it on their laptop, and that is very understandable. But Oolite being as compact or as big as you want is something that may be worthwhile to aim for.

Besides, it's not inconceivable to save games to a little USB drive that can be plugged into a laptop when you're on the go, and then plugged into a bigger setup at home where one might have all one's preferred bells and whistles.

Anyway, I just figured I'd toss it in as an idea because it seems to me that it could allow for some insane levels of ubericity to be developed.

If the HUD was more something that could be switched on and off when needed, because the scan and status functions were already on another screen/machine, the new developments in HUDs that are switchable for different functions could be maybe even more excellent. Have a manual ability to switch the HUD on with the options you want for combat or docking or mining. Then be able to switch it back off and just enjoy the scenery as you cruise while keeping an eye peeled for distant lasers or explosions out beyond scanner range.

You can switch the HUD on and off already. Alternatively there are dynamic HUDs released this week.

DaddyHoggy is the person to ask whether multiple screens work with Oolite.

I've seen mention on the forums somewhere of multiple screens not being supported. It might be possible to make a custom screen that's very large and use two monitors to view different parts of it, but that's a bit different and more a workaround to use multiple monitors. That's why I was thinking on the possibilities of multiple machines, so just a fairly small stream of data (compared to actual video display) would be what is traveling.

Software on the "receiving" machine would take the data and turn it into a display. That software could maybe be a stripped down version of Oolite modified to do just that job, or something written especially for the purpose.

---added on the edit after some thought---

You're probably right, and the simplest way of doing it would be just to define a screen twice as high as a normal screen and put the instrument panel in the lower half, and use different monitors to display the different halves. I *think* that could be done with the game the way it is currently. I was thinking it might be possible to do with older clunker machines, since they're often considerably cheaper than buying another video card and possibly a new monitor. I happen to have some old machines around, and so I sometimes think on ways they can be useful again.

Probably not enough people interested in what I was talking about who already have old machines onhand to make the idea actually a *good* suggestion. LOL

There's no need for a second machine. It would just be a USB Display. Oolite doesn't currently support them, but it wouldn't take a second machine to do it. It'd actually add needless complexity to do it that way, FYI.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/usb-gadgets/bfa3/
http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/usb-gadgets/c609/
And to really add some fun to it...
http://www.thrustmaster.com/product.asp ... atformID=5

Depending how it is hooked up you might be able to monitor certain variables within the programme and get the results outputted to a separate window. Might slow things down a bit though, depending on your polling speed and how clunky the gui front end of your "display" was. That is if you can poll the variables second to second, then trying to roll that out across 3 platforms.

Sounds great in principle.

Multiple computers? Hmm... I don't think it's a doable at this time. Oolite currently doesn't handle multi-core processors well, nevermind clustered machines.

Cmdr Wyvern wrote:

Multiple computers? Hmm... I don't think it's a doable at this time. Oolite currently doesn't handle multi-core processors well, nevermind clustered machines.

I thought it handled multi-core fine - it ignores all of them except the one its running?

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Cmdr Wyvern wrote:

Multiple computers? Hmm... I don't think it's a doable at this time. Oolite currently doesn't handle multi-core processors well, nevermind clustered machines.

I thought it handled multi-core fine - it ignores all of them except the one its running?

Exactly.
So getting it to run on more than one computer at a time? Weeeeell... Good luck with that!

One thing to note is that Oolite does run on a Matrox Triple Head to go (3840x1024) and a Quadroplex four monitor set up (2560x2048)

But it is only ever one view at a time!

(and the quadroplex view was better (although the monitors were more awkward to arrange) as the TH2G was a bit "letterbox" format!)

Why would it need multiple machines?
videocards have had secondary monitors as a feature for ... well years.

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

Why would it need multiple machines?
videocards have had secondary monitors as a feature for ... well years.

Even very good cards find it quite difficult to render non-contiguous scenes - so things like Matrox TH2G - one single scene spread over 3 screens and the Quadroxplex renders a single scene over 4x1, 1x4 or 2x2 screens.

We bought the HD 5970s for our simulator specifically because using the dual DVI and the display port ATI claim (under Vista/7 drivers) to be able to render (well) non-contiguous screens.

But in Oolite, if you had dual screen you'd have to persuade the engine (i.e. Ahruman) to render two different 3D views (front - rear for example) - this is quite a bit more work than just twice the number of pixels.

Clustering - which is what my simulator does - has a main PC which is in charge of the rest. The main PC responds to your controls updates the scene and then the client PCs which share a common view of the Ooniverse display a new view relative to the main PC at (at least) frame rate via a network.

The problem with Oolite in its current form even if you could somehow frig the debug console protocols to pass the info across the network is how would you get the client Oolite's to be so dumb that they didn't create any entities of their own BUT would create them at the bequest of the main PC. (and if, for example, you shot at and destroyed in the rear view that info would have to go back to the main PC to remove the entity from the scanner (for example) and then the main PC would decide what cargo would be spawned etc).

Therefore not nice! (But I still want it!)

BTW, that's just a generic response to some of the themes being mentioned on this thread, not to A_H specifically.

I think that if oolite were to use multiple processors then it would be sensible to offload something like AI to the second processor rather than a rear view.

I dont see how a second machine would ever make sense really.

Well, it's not really about making sense, Commander James. More like making madness. Some people into flight simulator software do some pretty insane things, like this..

http://www.laserfire.com/hanger3/myfltsimGC5.htm

Many of those instrument screens in the panels are being run by separate computers that take their "orders" from the main computer. It's not an uncommon capability in flight sims. The sort of project shown on that site is way out of my budget, but I have toggled up two computers with FlightGear (an open source flight sim) before so one could show the instrument panel while one showed the forward view, and it can be pretty cool. With a joystick and throttle, it was fun. Since the instrument panel doesn't need high rez and a great frame rate, that computer can be a somewhat older one, even running a crt monitor. Cheaper than buying a new LCD monitor and maybe a second graphics card, if you happen to have an old desktop or two around that have been retired.

I think it'd be neat if (somewhere in the future, perhaps) Oolite had that sort of capability. That's all I was saying, and all I was asking about.

It's not anything sensible in the slightest, that's what could make it fun. LOL

The only problem with running 2 monitors in forward view is that the join line is exactly where you would want to aim. Sure you could run one monitor as is and the other one double reflected. But your sitting position would have to be exact else you'd loose the effect.

I'd go with one big one to be perfectly honest. But truely it would be fine to have front, left, right and rear. I'd never leave the simulator.

I still think polling variables might be doable using a secondary programme. If you wanted a spartan hud and your stats on a second monitor. Can stats be read out to a text file and from there to a gui looking at it?

If someone were to try and run a second machine to do something interesting, I still think it shouldnt be another view, or half of a screen. I just doesnt make sense. Far better would be, as I think Clym is saying, to run something else, like a comms console or the short range chart which could be pretty independant and maybe communicate with a webservice or corba or whatever on the master machine.