That is exactly as it should be Marcel, Earth is the home of humanity after all. Those little lights must look really cool if your looking down on Earth at night 🙂

They don't hold a candle to the real thing, but they do make the place look inhabited. 🙂 I added Postojna, Gorenje, and Leerdam. I think I just about have all our hometowns in. There are a few that I can't get to show in their proper location. I'm thinking of posting to the issue tracker about that because there's something odd about placing bases at some locations, but I've got the Earth fairly well covered with locations from SSC. I've added 84 spaceports thus far. I'm going to review my work one more time to make sure I haven't missed anybody. If anyone has a request for a spaceport, let me know. 🙂

Aberdeen, Scotland

Currently a major oil & gas sea port, plus it has an airport (part of which is the world's largest commercial heliport, handling more than 37,000 helicopter flights annually). There is some manufacturing of oil/gas/mineral exploration and exploitation equipment in the city and surrounding area.

Aberdeen could feasibly boast a small-to-medium-size freight space-port, with plenty of Interplanetary Shuttle and Lifter traffic, with the odd Lion, Tiger, or Transporter passing through. Tech available from the spaceport would typically include mining machines, mining lasers, and fuel scoops, while the stock market should show lower-cost hydrogen and military fuels.

Plus, I live there (not that I expect to still be living there, or anywhere else for that matter, in the year 3200) 😀

Thanks Marcel 🙂

Your welcome Azimech! Aberdeen's already in there, highlander. You have a neighbor named Stardreamer. 😀

Is that actually a real name? It sounds like 'New Hamburger' or something... 🙂 Better than 'Old Hamburger' I suppose 😀 No gherkins on that one please.

"New Hamburg", I guess

Like "Nova Scotia" is "New Scotland".

Was Novo Hamburgo added?

Yes! 😀 This reminds me of Frontier where everyplace seemed to be new something or other. New San Francisco, New York, etc.

More than the requisite number of people had the surnames "Hooper" or "Kawasaki" - they seemed to be everywhere!

surname variance is ok

[attachment=878:station_splash.png]

Here's an updated station splash screen for alpha 13. Save the above image in your data/ships/default_ship_textures folder and overwrite the old one. I'm still working on those stations, making slow but steady progress. 🙂

Is it a bug that this remains in English when I play in German?

You're going to have to release an awful lot of updates for this model if you really want to pretend to show the BBS at the end of the docking bay.

I seem to recall saying this at the time 😉

That's an interesting point. I could revert it to the previous "Diet Steakette" ad, but oops! it's in English. All the other adverts are, too. As I said before, I'm not totally attached to it. I just thought it was a cute idea. I could just do a version with no text at all, or perhaps the people producing the other language versions would have to translate the ads as well. I'd have to spend all my time translating ads. I'd rather be doing stuff like this.

[attachment=879:mushroom_inside00.jpg]

All I did was add a simple floor texture to the old ground station, but it makes a big difference. It seems more like a room now. I should have done this a long time ago!

Another thought on the station splash thread. There were some excellent BBS backgrounds posted a while ago. I'm not sure who did them now, maybe s2odan? Anyway, I don't know why they never made it into the game, but they deserve to be in there imho. The station splash advert would look fantastic without text and with noise over the screen with a background like that. Be that as it may, I'm for random adverts in the stations. Call a function that determines where you are and places random ads as appropriate. I may figure out how to do this later but I'll probably ask for help. That's for the future. Right now I'm working at the limit of my ability trying to texture the mushroom station. 🙄

So many ideas, so little brains...

😆

Nice one Marcel and so true too, at least in my case :lol:............... 😳

Yes I remember those backgrounds, I wonder what happened to them? Very "industrial" looking. The "traditional" blue background is fine, very Frontier like, but perhaps (like many things already done in the game right now) it's time to have a think how the BBS could be made to look better? Pioneer after all is starting to leave Frontier behind now.

Also, didn't Gernot do a lot of ads for the game......um including.......some 🙄 Commodore ones? How hard is it to do ads? I know the ones in Oolite are really funny at times 🙂

Easy. Just make .png textures in power-of-two sizes (64x64, 128x128, 256x256... not too gigantic please), then we rename them to something like ad01, ad02 and pick at random. They can have alpha channel for transparency (if it's not already supported, we'll add it). As for content... avoid copyrighted stuff and anything can be mercilessly removed at a later date :]

Ads are easy; just textured quads really. If someone wants to put some together I'll hook you up with someone who can grok enough of the model code to get them into the game (a pretty easy thing really).

Station backgrounds have been discussed. There's a few competing ideas around, each with their own pros and cons. s20dan did those industrial ones with the cutouts for the faces and menu text that we've been discussing here again. Friendly (the chap who did the new control panel) did a nice mockup for some "generic" patterned backgrounds. There was also a recent discussion on IRC about simply applying some alpha and maybe blurring to the world view and showing UI screens over that, in which case the "background" would actually be the game proper. This is more code than art but the engine support isn't quite there yet (but coming rapidly).

I think we won't have a clear picture of the "best" approach until experiments have been done.

Here are any backgrounds that were ever made:

https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pioneer/issues/315

Please join in the discussion and voice your opinion. Personally I far prefer this industrial looking menu to a generic non-descript background but Im in the minority allegedly 🙂

The people have spoken and they want I-Pioneer. While these blue menus with some blur might look very nice and clean, they aren't very immersive when compared to a more realistic background, thats my opinion.

Ahh, I forgot we had an open issue. Re-reading it now it doesn't sound like we had any strong consensus, so I wouldn't say "the people have spoken". More input welcome!

No I suppose not, but it just seemed like those involved (Myself, you, Luomu, and Brinaetta) seemed to be leaning towards the I-Pioneer look. I was even convinced for a while 🙂

I never expressed a preference. I don't even have one. As long as the UI remains usable, I'm happy.

Hi, I wanted to make a model to put into this awesome game (thankyou all very very very much for making it! big fan of elite 2 way back then), I used wings 3d to make a model and gimp to texture it and exported it as an obj into the mods folder along similar vein to cobra using that lua as a base. I cannot however get my model to change skins as do some of the others.

Is there a way for a single .obj model with a .mtl file to have different textures, basically i want it to change top and bottom textures from 1 camo pattern to another ;

[img= ]

Also I tried to make the engines glow with locallights but the ship went dark, I realise this is mentioned in the wiki but are there any other ways of getting a texture to glow? I do not know how to make the ships directly from instructions in the .lua so I am probably at a disadvantage with a single obj model but I thought I would ask anyway.

Thanks for any help,

stringue

I take it you were actually able to get it to load in-game? If so this is easier to explain..

Anyway, the current way of using varying textures randomly is using the selector function as I don't think (seed) can be used with a ships .lua yet. Although if it can that would be a better way.

Here is the commented out selector function from the Viper which would if activated randomly select between the set of textures, in this case regular and police:

There are quite a few other examples of the selector function in many ships, such as the Eagle and Imperial Courier.

As for engine glow, certainly don't use local lighting, thats for internal stuff like cockpits or the pilots face 🙂 Edit//, actually you could so it that way, but I prefer this way:

The best way is to select the engine (glowing parts) in Blender or Wings 3d and cut it from the main model and save that as a seperate model, you must also save the original without it in 🙂

Then assign a glowing material to that single part in the ships lua :

Things to note there:

This is your colour : 1.7, 2.2, 2.5 It actually doesnt go above 1.0 but Ill explain this in a moment.

And this is the second colour: .1, .2, 0.5. It cycles/scales between those colours at a rate defined by : lerp_materials(get_arg(1)*0.25. Increase or decrease 0.25 to speed or slow the cycle.

Having the first colour above 1.0 just means that it stays at one colour for a longer time during the cycle, then quickly shuts off...

It would be nice to scale glows by temperature or throttle instead of time, but we can't do that just yet.

P.S. Very nice model 🙂

Geraldine

Take a look inside the \data\models\spacestations.lua file with wordpad or whatever. Search for station_splash to go to where the ad is called. You can replace the names of the models with others that are already in the game if you want. Station_splash.lua is in the models folder. It's a basic ad model. You simply have to make a powers of two image, not necessarily square, and rename things to get it to display where you want. I think a few people around here would be quite happy if you'd replace station_splash with something better. 😉