Oolite Bulletins

Ok, I've definitely seen cases of enemy friendly fire. Like when you're chasing a runner and one of his buddies comes onto your 6 to give your aft a spanking, you jink, and he accidentally hits his bud. Very annoying sometimes when you've gotten the runner leaking plasma and his own buddy FFs him and you loose the bounty. It happens.



But get a look at this one:



It doesn't look to me like there was anybody behind me in a position to be shooting in at that angle, so is it more likely just an odd moment for the video card at the instant I was hitting the screenie key? I do know at least one of my opponents had multiple lasers (a Weta Rua or something like that, one of the WAKA ships), but it seems unlikely that they'd be at the same angle as mine.

Really, it doesn't look quite right with either pic for the angle of the extra beams when compared with the scanner. Does the scanner maybe lag the viewscreen a fraction of a second or vice versa? Even a small fraction could account for it, since I was jinking a lot to try and keep my aft intact while I took out that Krait.

I was snagging screenies while fighting, since the Griff Kraits are really neat looking ships in a fight, but then I looked at the screenshots afterwards and went "Huh??"

Any ideas on this?[/url]

hard to tell from that pic, but is that the Krait right in the centre? just it looks cyan/missiley on this screen.
were youplaying normal speed? i now in slo-mo you get a strobing effect sometimes when a ship strokes you w/ fire when it's diving or climbing.

Interesting pics - had you thought to PAUSE and then adjust TAF to run less than realtime to see if it was a screen update issue?

I was playing normal speed. To be honest I don't know how to set the game for anything else, and I doubt I usually would anyway. This was just a little furball that found me while I was still in view of the witchpoint beacon. I'd jumped to Bebege and a group of 6 ships decided to volunteer to give me a bit of a workout. While I was chasing the Krait down, I decided to try for a few screenshots to see if I could get lucky with something tasty looking for my collection.

I had the Krait targetted for missile, but then happened to shoot off his injector, so I'd cut speed and was using bursts of my injector between jinks. In the second pic I'm doing a slow roll left to match the Krait.

This is probably going to be a newbie question, but what is TAF? I hadn't thought to try any adjustments since everything looked fine while playing, just the screenshot looks a bit odd on the number of laser beams. So I didn't actually see it until I exited the game. The game was playing fine, and everything looked normal so far as I noticed (though does anybody notice a lot in the middle of a scuffle? LOL). I know there was a ship behind me since I was taking occasional damage on the aft shields and saw enemy friendly fire hit the Krait at least a couple times. That's definitely the first pic, but I'm pretty sure it's not what we see in the second one.

If it is of any help in figuring out the likelihood of a screen update issue, system specs are AMD dual core 64 processor in an Asus M2N68 AM motherboard with 2 gigs of ram, Nvidia GeForce 9500GT video card with a gig of ram, SBLive! 5.1 soundcard. OS is Ubuntu Jaunty.

The game is running at TAF 1x by default - but if you pause the game then you can use the left and right arrow keys to slow the game down 1/32x or speed it up 32x normal.

Pressing SHIFT+F will show you what your current TAF is.

HTH

DH

BTW, did you take a screenshot by using in-game mechanism SHIFT+8 (i.e. *) or Ubuntu's normal print screen method?

It makes a difference - we've seen tearing in screenshots using the generic OS mechanism, whereas I believe the game itself grabs the frame buffer (or somesuch) when a screenie is taken.

Shift 8.

I checked something.



That screenie was taken while spinning the ship (yaw). So it looks like it was most likely a side-effect of being in motion at the time. Perhaps the game doing assorted checks and processes results in the military laser actually being a very fast pulse sort of weapon. Not really troublesome or noticeable during gameplay, though.

I would also think that you've captured multiple images of your own single laser beam. The effect ist most notable when you fire one of your side lasers while accelerating or decelerating. Then you see also the laser mount position seemingly moving back or forward.

And, as nobody else has answered that question yet: TAF is the Time Acceleration Factor. You can speed Oolite up to 16 times and slow it down to 1/16 of normal time. You can control it by pressing the left and right arrow keys while paused.

Agreed, Commander McLane. The picture in question is obviously a case of multiple laser image being captured rather than enemy FF. Though I have seen clear cases of enemy FF that have sometimes "robbed" me of a bounty. It is not often, and mostly I've only seen it happen in those afterburner chase situations.

Thank you for the explanation of TAF. It's not a function I'd usually want in gameplay, so I didn't even know the capability existed for it in Oolite. I just run the game at default speed and consider the things that take some time and the things that are hectic to be part of the flow.

I do admit though (as is obvious) that when I'm looking to make a good screenshot, the pause key is my friend. LOL

One thing I need to get around to doing is editing the keyconfig to get screenshots to be a single keystroke. I'm one of those people who really hate multiple keystrokes on any game controls, and since I have the buttons on the joystick taking care of some of the more common keystroke functions, it frees up some "real estate" on the keyboard so I can usually find a comfortable spot for necessary keys.

Ganelon wrote:

One thing I need to get around to doing is editing the keyconfig to get screenshots to be a single keystroke.

I need this… if you work-out how to do it easily, let me know.
As regards the TAF… 0.25 is a good speed for pics, but it’s like flying in treacle.
Like you, I never use it in gameplay… only occasionly for pics.

It's fairly easy.

First, find keyconfig.plist in whatever directory or folder Oolite actually runs from on your machine/system.

Save a copy of it to the folder you put your OXP folders in.

Now open the copy you just made and saved and if you look through the file, you'll see a line that looks like:

key_snapshot = "*";

Change the * to any key you don't use in the game, like q for example. (You can look through the list to make absolutely sure whatever letter you want to use doesn't already do something you just might never have known about.)

Save that copy of the file with that change.

Start Oolite while holding down the shift key, same as you do when you've just added an OXP.

And there ya go, El Viejo.

That simple, eh! Many thanks, Ganelon... looks like I might be taking a lot of pics tomorrow.

Apologies for double posting, but I wanted to get your answer up quickly and without a lot of excess words attached to it.

Using the "q" key may or may not be what you like. It's kind of close to the Energy Bomb on the tab key for comfort. LOL But on the plus side, it'd be easy to remember if you think of a screenshot as a "quickshot".

You can obviously do other things as well, like maybe using "x" to jettison cargo, and "d" for autodock (which would eliminate that possibility of dumping cargo when you just want to dock fast).

There are a few oddities I've noticed though, some keys where it doesn't work so well to change them. The "a" key, for instance. I don't ever use the "a" key to fire my lasers, I use the trigger on my joystick. I would *like* to use the "a" key for something else, like autodock or whatever. The problem is, even if I take out the line entirely that says:

key_fire_lasers = "a";

...and assign it to something else, the lasers will still fire a short burst any time I use that key. Not so good if I want to use it for "autodock", since I'd autodock, but also shoot the station! LOL

The "a" key is probably a special case, since it's one of the most primal game functions, so there's maybe something back in the core code that is looking for it to put it at a higher priority or something.

But mostly you can remap the keys to do whatever you like, with a few exceptions like the "a".

The reason for making a separate copy and saving it to your AddOns folder is in case you mess up somehow. You can always just delete your fancy changed file and the game will go back to the defaults.

Little changes like eliminating double keystrokes for functions you use often (or where missing the shift key could have bad results) are pretty easy to do and useful enough. But if you're up for a bit more messing around, and willing to play with paints and your art program to make new labels for your keys and glue them on, you could do something like this guy does..

http://www.rogerdodger.net/diyflightsim ... d_mod.html

... and even make an actual sort of custom control panel (or more than one, as shown in the pic on that site) for Oolite. That is a concept I've been working towards myself as a "back burner" project, so someday I can have a nice control panel for playing Oolite on. But it takes a bit more work and thought than I thought it would at first, since I'm trying to come up with a good sensible layout for the keys where related functions (like all the keys used in combat, for example) would be grouped together in one easy to use cluster. Then there's coming up with short names for the keys for the labels. Pushing a button marked "FIRE" is a lot more fun than "m". LOL

But a keyboard key is only maybe a centimetre square, so there really isn't room for more than short labels. Also, I had to discard one set of new key labels I was trying already since it looked good.. Until I tried using it in the dark. I use a dim red light to see the keys well enough to play when the room is dark, and the white letters on red background I used for my "combat functions cluster" wasn't worth a crap in red light. LOL

I used 'b'... worked sweetly in trunk. Thanks again.

Glad to be able to help anybody for a change, instead of just having a zillion questions to ask.