shiptool is an integrated ship model viewing tool with the possibility of extension to become a fully integrated ship model editor.
Without any command line arguments shiptool will start with the following configuration:
3D acceleration is enabled.
Multithreading is enabled.
Lighting is enabled.
The resolution is set to 640x480. Other values include 320x200 (--lores) and 1024x768 (--hires)
shiptool has several command line arguments controlling important run time behaviours. These are as follows:
By using this parameter users who either do not have a 3D accelerator (such as the 3DFX Voodoo series) or are experiencing problems with accelerated Mote may turn off hardware acceleration. When doing this the following points should be noted:
Texturing will no longer work. All game objects will display using their primary polygon colours alone.
Users with an operational 3D card and using this argument will see a severe drop in framerate. Users without are likely to see a slight increase.
For debugging purposes only. As gdb has occasional problems dealing with threaded programs running underneath it this option is used to turn of shiptool's threaded behavior. This option is of limited utility to the end user.
Using this option turns off the shiptool's lighting behaviour, causing the model being viewed to appear as if surrounded by extremely bright lighting. This behaviour may be controlled by shiptool's button panel also.
Use of this option with shiptool is unsupported at the present time and may therefore have unusual effects. It is intended that the GLUT window should start at 1024x768, in a similar fashion to the Mote game itself.
Use of this option with shiptool is unsupported at the present time and may therefore have unusual effects. It is intended that the GLUT window should start at 320x200, in a similar fashion to the Mote game itself.
Shiptool will return a zero exit code on sucessful completion of a game session. Error exit codes include:
No OpenGL or compliant library (eg MESA) was found. Shiptool cannot start.
Shiptool requires the following files to run (paths taken from the top level Mote working directory):
This libary contains all the core Mote functionality- the shiptool merely calls functions within it and provides a user interface for ship manipulation.
Deprecated. Guile scheme files to initialise the game state are stored here. These will shortly be removed and the functionality replaced with MotePerl. At the current time Shiptool still relies on these files to decide which ship to display. This is a hack, we do not deny it!
It is my intention to provide a brief rundown of the function of each button/menu item in Shiptool. Unfortunately my copy of Shiptool appears to be irreparably damaged.
The path to libmote.so must be in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable. Set this environment variable and invoke Shiptool as normal. The first player ship (usually a SeaDragon) should appear in a GLUT window.
Please report any bugs in this manpage (or Shiptool) to <bugs@mote.sourceforge.net>. Please note that the CVS version of Shiptool does not currently compile or run:
Plib has added extra functionality to libmote.so. Therefore the link step in the build process is currently incorrect for Shiptool.
Problems exist in the compatibility of the Mote Model Display system and the one Shiptool used to use. Please see the Known Bugs section in the main documentation for more information.