Oolite Bulletins

v3.0 is now available - OXZ only.
The release post is here.

The Star-jelly is a strange, translucent space-dwelling organism, often found in or near asteroid fields, where they may remain for some time trapped in the weak gravitational fields of the asteroids. Star-jellys have limited movement, and are normally content to float free in space being wafted around by the solar wind.
They are believed to 'feed' by absorbing the small traces of Quirium found in interplanetary space. Because of their high Quirium content, destroying them is not recommended.
They are seldom found in interstellar space.
Star-Jellys are not thought to be intelligent, and although their biology is un-clear they are thought to be more like plants than animals.



More info and downloads via the Wiki page.

that looks pretty. "translucent", tho? i thought Oolite didn't do transparency?

if you do any smaller versions as young ones, they'll be....

Just by seeing the pic - looks like flipped normals. Funny idea, Smivs! He .-)

Killer Wolf wrote:

if you do any smaller versions as young ones, they'll be....

Don't start me....

Nice, inspired by ST-TNG pilot episode I'd guess.

Svengali wrote:

Just by seeing the pic - looks like flipped normals. Funny idea, Smivs! He .-)

Yes it is flipped normals, it was completely accidental and something to do with blenders .obj export function... which ended up messing up the normals, but to quite a nice effect.

Just uploaded v1.1.
The original version was creating too many of these when Rock Hermits were present, as the Star-Jellys are spawned as Asteroids, and you get lots of asteroids around Hermits.
This will make them quite rare in systems without Hermits (which I think is OK) and you should get 1-2 per system when hermits are present.

They're great !

Think I'll stick with version 1 for now: I like the way they "flower".

Any chance they could be given a unique colour on the navigation thingy ?

how's the flipped normal thing work then? when i've been testing docks that face inwards the walls are invisible not translucent.

I think it just worked with this shape - serendipity.
When viewed straight on the facing sides are invisible, but seeing the 'sides' and 'back' give the impression of translucency.
It's just a happy accident that we were able to exploit to good effect.

Nice that Smivs is getting all the credit for the model, even though it was me who made it

don't worry, I don't really care what it gets used for

Staer9 wrote:

Nice that Smivs is getting all the credit for the model, even though it was me who made it

It was you who cocked it up! but it has to be said in a truly inspired way. I don't think I'm getting all the credit by the way....all the blame maybe and I've been careful to share that with you.

Actually it was Blender that messed it up when I exported to OBJ format ready to convert to DAT, the BLEND file is fine, but both the OBJ and the DAT have this handy little error

Just goes to show it takes two geniuses and a weird bit of software to make an OXP

Smivs wrote:

Just uploaded v1.1.
The original version was creating too many of these when Rock Hermits were present, as the Star-Jellys are spawned as Asteroids, and you get lots of asteroids around Hermits.
This will make them quite rare in systems without Hermits (which I think is OK) and you should get 1-2 per system when hermits are present.

BTW, their rarity will mainly depend on whether the player has other asteroid-adding OXPs installed. I for one have AsteroidStorm.oxp which decreases the chances of a starbelly "asteroid" to be drawn from the lottery. I just did a small test and had about 1 starbelly in 100 asteroids.

What I can't see from the OXP is any relation to the presence of Rock Hermits, so that seems to be a conjecture. Oolite spawns asteroid fields with or without Rock Hermits in them (it seems to me the majority of them have no hermits), and starjellies may be created instead of asteroids anywhere and anytime. (This could potentially break OXPs that add mission-relevant dockables with surrounding asteroid fields, if the asteroids get fired upon. I am not aware of currently existing mission-added stations with miners, though, so the OXP-breaking capability is probably only theoretical at this point.)