User:Ahruman

Jens Ayton was the second lead developer for Oolite, taking over from Aegidian around 2006/7 and surrendering the baton to Cim in 2013/4.

Jens refactored nearly all of Oolite's code inherited from Aegidian and effectively redesigned the game's entire architecture, making it 21st century ready and causing massive improvements in pretty much everything from performance to graphics to gameplay and so on. He wasn't just another programmer in the project, he was THE programmer in the project. This included introducing shaders, for better visual effects. He also brought in JavaScript for OXPs, allowing more sophistication. And he was a fearsome partisan for Yaw in the Roll vs Yaw crusades‎, introducing it into Oolite.

Hence the long list of Oolite versions (from 1.67 up to 1.76) over the next five years, as he bedded down all the various changes. These versions were unstable and Jens started talking of "the MNSR" (Mythical Next Stable Release (after Aegidian's 1.65)). Version 1.76 was his first important release, coming out in Dec 2011, with a tweak (v1.76.1) the following May. Some of the then development team at that time (Aegidian, Kaks, Micha and another_commander) even met up in a pub in London with some members of the community, fully equipped with laptops and stuff and did the release from inside the pub in full celebration. Versions 1.77/1.771 (2013) were the last of the 'old-style' versions. Then Cim took over.

The author of Dry Dock for Oolite, the then premier post-processing tool for Oolite spacecraft models.

Sense of humour

Try this list of new stuff in Oolite Test Release 1.67 (2007):

• GLSL shader support. Now you too can have psychadelic Thargons, assuming your hardware supports it.
• another_commander’s Advanced Navigational Array. Activated by !, replacing the Mac-only dump-galactic-chart command (you can find the dumped data on the wiki).
• Bigger radar blobs for big blobby things.
• Giles’s experimental procedural textures (not dajt’s). Activate by pausing (P), then pressing T. The change will take effect when a new planet texture is generated, i.e. it won’t affect the planet in the current system. This feature is, er, in need of additional performance optimization.
• Yaw control, possibly. The comments say “keypad 1 and 3”, but those don’t work for me (presumably GNUstep/Cocoa differences). Have fun trying to find out what does. To do: disable this in strict mode.
• New spiffy log filtering system (now with 20% extra spiff). As described elsewhere.

...

• Your surprise discovery here.

OXPs

Written to help OXP developers:

• File:JavaScript test.oxp.zip
• File:DebugOXP-171.zip
• File:DebugOXP-170.zip
• File:DebugMenuOXP-1.69.zip
• File:Ahruman-demo-glow alloy mod.oxp.zip

Links

He has a programming blog thing which updates some years.