Oolite Bulletins

Well...I think, space background in Oolite is a LITTLE BIT too dark. From large distance it is nearly impossible to see very small, pale point, and confuse it with a star. Therefore I have two suggestions: either make enemy ships more visible (brighter) or add a special feature - a marker, which will mark all ships on the screen -something like this:


This screen comes from FFE D3D, but I think, it will be more easier to fight from distance, when it will be possible to see where are ships and where only stars or other space objects...
How about this?

prob is you can't cater for every machine, as everyone has their monitors set up differently - i have this prob doing art for my site, something that looks good on my set up looks washed-out on my work monitor, etc.
my solution is different profiles in my Catalyst Control Centre - i have a games setting for Oolite that jacks up the brightness/gamma.

I thought about that and I've tried different profiles, but I think, universal solution is, implement such feature, which automatically mark all ships around player's ship. Of course optionally.

The background darkness, or rather the ambient lighting (that's the amount of light which seems to come from nowhere and be everywhere) is configurable. You need to create a file named planetinfo.plist and put it into your AddOns-folder (you may create a Config-folder within your AddOns-folder and put it there). The content of planetinfo.plist should look like this: The value of ambient_level determines the overall background brightness. 1.00 is the default value. Give it a higher value to make things brighter (if you make the value too high the planets and ships will begin to look cartoonish) or a lower value to make things darker.

Note, however, that you may have installed OXPs which already change the ambient_level, perhaps making it smaller. If Oolite finds two different values for ambient_level in two different planetinfo.plist-files, there is unfortunately no way to determine which one will be used. Therefore you should also check your OXPs in order to find out whether one (or some) of them change the overall lighting in Oolite.

Generally, when installing OXPs, you should be aware what they are doing. If you don't like part of what they do, you are free to either not install them or modify them to your liking.

There is also a second, completely unrelated to Oolite explanation for a too dark background, and that's your general monitor setting. People have made good experiences with changing their monitor gamma in order to make things better visible.

Ok, but what with my second suggestion? Do you think it is worthless/too hard for implementing?

How would it look if there were twenty or thirty ships on screen... far too crowded, I reckon.
Personally, I wouldn't like it... it would need to be an OXP.

Yes, I agree with you, therefore I wrote "optionally"

Sorry OSH, I missed your 'optional' option.

It's not doable in an OXP. It would require a rewrite of the HUD code.

So, if any of the developers would devote himself to it, it would most certainly be a post-MNSR thing. And that's still a big if.

Part of it as already there, of course. Once you've targeted all ships in your vicinity, you can cycle through them and mark one at a time, provided you have the  necessary  equipment installed. I don't know whether the developers would be willing to go not only one, but several steps further than that, by (a) making several targets visible at the same time and (b) removing the need for the player to actively target them first.

Commander McLane wrote:

The background darkness, or rather the ambient lighting (that's the amount of light which seems to come from nowhere and be everywhere) is configurable. You need to create a file named planetinfo.plist and put it into your AddOns-folder (you may create a Config-folder within your AddOns-folder and put it there). The content of planetinfo.plist should look like this:
Code:
{
universal = {
"ambient_level" = "1.00";
};
}

The value of ambient_level determines the overall background brightness. 1.00 is the default value. Give it a higher value to make things brighter (if you make the value too high the planets and ships will begin to look cartoonish) or a lower value to make things darker.

Note, however, that you may have installed OXPs which already change the ambient_level, perhaps making it smaller. If Oolite finds two different values for ambient_level in two different planetinfo.plist-files, there is unfortunately no way to determine which one will be used. Therefore you should also check your OXPs in order to find out whether one (or some) of them change the overall lighting in Oolite.

About the ambient light - what about making it an option like the music loudness in options menu? That way we would be able to see what it does, without editing the files and risking blowing sth up. Not even mentioning the OXPs - this way they could change it, but only temporarily and you could set it back to what you prefer.
Just my 0.1 c.

Killer Wolf wrote:

prob is you can't cater for every machine, as everyone has their monitors set up differently - i have this prob doing art for my site, something that looks good on my set up looks washed-out on my work monitor, etc.

And therefor it is a bad thing that some oxps change this value. e.g system_Demux sets things darker. Maybe the author preferred things darker because his monitor is very bright. system_Redux also sets an ambient level. In this case the default value. Does not sound wrong in the first place, but by doing so it might revert any effect from an oxp that does want to explicit change the settings.

Best thing would be to have an separate oxp for this that does nothing else. Look for example at Deep_Horizon-Lights_Down That oxp only changes the sky. In this case it sets the light darker but you can use this oxp as base and change the values to your personal likening. Look at the [wiki]Planetinfo.plist[/wiki] to see the meaning and default values of the entries.

And I agree with Zireael that a ambient level modifier in oolites preferences would be great. On my most used monitor things are a bit to dark to my likening, while things are perfect on my other monitor.

The next major release cycle will involve major changes to ship rendering, and possibly the background too. This may or may not improve ship visibility.

The marker thing is absolutely, definitely, categorically not happening.

Ahruman wrote:

The marker thing is absolutely, definitely, categorically not happening.

Music to my ears!

What marker thing?
...
I asked for options slider... would it be possible in the next release?

Zireael wrote:

What marker thing?

Err... the one the Original Poster asked about?

About the slider, it would involve a lot of jiggery pokery to make ships uniformly brighter/dimmer... each new ship/station/missile/asteroid set added to Oolite via oxp would have to be calibrated separately for all of them to have similar albedos when appearing all together in the game, and quite a few ships were meant to be stealthy as an explicit design requirement, so I'm not even quite sure what kind of approach would be best...