Oolite Bulletins

With encouragement from El Viego I have reached stage 2 of this ship OXP. At this point the paint job is not finished. I have never modeled and skinned a ship before so I would certainly welcome suggestions and critique. I have several older versions of the texture file so I can try different methods if this one is as you Brits might say, "Rather ugly that".


Edit: This is the final texturing of the player and escort variants of the Copperhead:

Looks good. Now try and add more detail.

Tried to add more detail - ta Pagroove. Still not finished. Thanks to Smivs who sent me some artwork to incorporate. I think he was telling me to make the cockpit viewport smaller and I will do that. At this point going to look at it in game before continuing with the detailing.

CaptSolo wrote:

I think he was telling me to make the cockpit viewport smaller

No.
I don't know how big the Copperhead is, so judging scale is difficult. My concern was that it's easy (or at least I found it easy) to make them too big. Easy answer - check the width and length, then work out what a sensible size is. For example if the ship is 50m long, and the width of the cockpit is about a tenth of the ship's length, you've got a 5m wide cockpit. That's about 15 feet in English, and would actually be quite a big cockpit.
Having said that, if you make it a 'sensible' size, it might be too small to see!

Texture's coming on nicely

I see you have moved your project to a different thread, the texture looks great (I am rubish at texturing... all I ever do is select blender's texture paint option then I scribble all over it several times) One thing that you could do is stretch the exhaust ring, at the moment it is very circular, I think an oval might look better. other than that you could put a metal_tex image over the top in a layer and set blend mode to overlay, then play about with the opacity. Or just set the shinyness in the shipdata.plist which does pretty much the same thing.

I'm an idiot! I had the ship length along the X axis. I should have known better having viewed the dimensions of the Anaconda. Fixed this morning and the texture file still works but I did have to tweak the scaling.

Pirate Copperhead encountered:



Also player, escort and interceptor AI's. When satisfied will post d/l link in this thread for anyone who wishes to add it to their Ooniverse.

Concerning the exhaust plume: I searched here for correct definition of the number descriptors to no avail so assumed first three were coordinates and last three might be width, length, and injector length. Could some one correct me on this.

That's looking really nice, Solo... I've no idea about co-ords though.

From another thread somewhere (apologies - can't quote original poster)

exhaust

x y z width height length

length in meters, how long a plume is on z axis. (This value is in current Oolite versions ignored. Length is now derived from the ships speed)

Think I'm nearly done tweaking the plists. There are four variants: player, escort, pirate, and a GalCop route patroler. I have no idea why anyone would want to use it as a player ship as it's max cargo is set to 10 and no large cargo bay available. It is after all a fairly small ship as was it's predecessor in the Arch version of Elite but having flown it and fought with it, I can say it is a tough ship. Only scenario for a player could possibly be passenger transport but I would quickly tire of that I think. The backstory for the ship will be given with it's release except to say it's main role is as a support craft. The GalCop version has an upgraded engine so it doesn't slow down the Vipers. The pirate and GalCop versions have modified paint jobs. It is my first ship so if it sucks that is why.

Looks nice, I'm impressed. Let me know when it is finished, I like having a variety of ships to fight.

After reading the Oolite Wiki shipdata.plist page I have decided to drop the Galcop variant. In it's place will be the Copperhead Bewary variant. This ship has been assigned route1traderAI with roles of hunter, scavenger, trader, and hermit-ship.

"with roles of hunter, scavenger, trader, and hermit-ship"
If you haven't, you might want to put numbers on those to make it a rare ship as those.
It might be full weight hunter which is the same as hunter(1.0), but uncommon as a scavenger(0.4), rare as a trader(0.1), and semi-rare as a hermit-ship(0.25).
Sure you don't want it to be a very rare pirate(0.05)?

Like this in total:
roles = "hunter pirate(0.05) scavenger(0.4) trader(0.1) hermit-ship(0.25)";

Many thanks Switeck. I wasn't aware of chance of occurrence assignment.