List of software

Useful software to have when making an OXP.

Oolite specific converters

Ship models etc. need to be converted to Oolite's ".dat" format

• see Oolite converters

3D model applications

• Wings3D Cross-platform; Free. Highly advised for Oolite. A quick tutorial by Aegidian -> OXP_howto_model
• Meshwork OSX; Free.
• Modo Cross Platform; Free. Has tutorials.
• 3D mesh editor
• Blender3D Cross-platform, Free, powerful 3D modeller.
• Moray
• UV Mapper (Pro), Mac and Windows, Texture mapping tool. Pro trial version for Windows available.
• xNormal This does certain things better than Blender, producing better quality normals, height, ambient occlusion. Windows only.
• Blacksmith3D-Paint Paint directly on to your model! It lets you paint straight over any seams in a manner that makes it very easy to see accurately which bits join exactly where. Windows and Mac.
• Normal Map Combiner This utility is designed to combine two normal maps into one and to fix bad normal vectors in auto generated normal maps. Windows only.
• Balancer Lite Windows + Mac. Features polygon reduction or mesh decimation for Wavefront (obj). Lite version is free for non-commercial purposes.
• Oolite is low-poly, so any user-friendly 3D editor will do, provided it supports DAT or OBJ.

Terrain Generation

Exported objects may need optimization.

• Blender Planet Textures
• Terragen Mac + Windows. Terrain generator with export option to obj. Free version for non-commerical use available.
• EarthSculptor Mac + Windows. Terrain generator with export option to obj. Free version for non-commerical use available.

• ?FracPlanet Linux.

Graphics Editors

• AdobePhotoshop
• Corel Paintshop Pro
• GIMP Free, cross-platform powerful image-editor.
• OmniGraffle OSX, Trial version available.
• any other freeware software that supports layers
• Filter Tools

Graphics Optimization

• OptiPNG Linux, Mac, Windows - Open-Source zlib/libpng License
• pngcrush Linux, Windows - OSI-Approved Open Source

Programmer's TextEditors or PlistEditors

• Crimson Editor
• Editplus
• JEdit
• SubEthaEdit (V2.2) (mac) - no syntax checkers for Javascript
• SlickEdit (mac)
• plistEdit V1.2
• VS Code Visual Studio Code (mac, Linux, Windows) - has a Javascipt syntax checker, optional add-ons include .plist syntaxes
• Programmers Notepad (windows) - has syntax checking for both javascript and xml
• PListEditPro, OSX, highly recommended to switch between ascii and XML...
• Notepad++, for Windows. Excellent Notepad replacement, with multi-language support.
  
• Script Editor, OSX, part of the AppleMac package that is installed by default.
• (g)Vim, a powerful cross-platform editor. A syntax highlighter for plist files is also available.
• Overview of editors for various operating systems

Linters

• cag's Python3 linter (catches missing ;'s, unquoted keys containing dashes, keys w/o values and delimiter errors) is here: bedeviled by missing ;'s? this may help (2018)

Audio Tools

• Audacity Cross platform, under GNU General Public License (GPL).

Support tools

• Debug OXP/Debug Menu OXP and other tools following the Oolite_debug_console_TCP_protocol
• Python Cross platform language under Python Software Foundation License. For Oolites tools 2.6 (not 3.x!!) is required.

There are plenty other free editors and tools available, these are just a few.