Elite Strike pre-release patch!

[Halleck]

Wow, that looks fantastic! Although, those wires running along the arms might be a bit too much (unless they perform a vital function.)

Hm... You know, I've been thinking a bit, and I'm slightly concerned that this will wind up dwarfing the relatively simple models that are already in-game. The detail in this model is so great as to be almost disproportionate.

How does this sound:
Can you make a middle LOD that retains the same geometric complexity as the current model, but doesn't contain the greebles and doodads? This would be useful for two reasons. Apart from being a neccessary LOD, it would also allow me to use that one in-game until there is less of a disproportion between the detail in this model and the rest of the models in the data set.

I'll certainly try this top-level LOD in-game as well once we have a semi-decent texture for it, but my gut feeling is that this may cause the other models to seem crude by comparison.

Please don't take offense- This model is great on it's own, but I'm just concerned about how well it will fit in with the current data set.
I know that Nózmájner wanted to explore the possibilities of modelling in greater detail as well. If I wind up using a lower-poly model, it will probably just be a temporary arrangement until we have a few ships in the data set of an equivalent detail level, at which point we would switch to using the top-level LOD.

[chuck_starchaser]

Nothing could be easier to do. Here you go:
http://www.deeplayer.com/dan_w/FFE/whee ... StnNDD.zip
(NDD="No Doodads".)
2268 tris.

Thing is, tho, Ryder is texturing the top LOD model. But you can use that one and just supress display of material 2.
The doodads are all material 2; the rest is material 1.

R.E.: The Wires, I agree; I just wanted to add something subtle to give the thing a bit more sense of volume and 3D-ness. They are pretty thin though, and much of their visibility in the rendering is due to the shadows they cast, I think.
I'm willing to bet they'll be hardly noticeable in-game. I'd say try it as is first, and if they look too much there in game they are easy to thin out further or delete; takes two seconds.

[Halleck]

Perfect!
Thanks a lot, this will make an excellent medium-range LOD.

BTW, you are now an official member of the Elite Strike crew.

[chuck_starchaser]

Thanks! What else you need? I got FFE installed so I can take pics and stuff. I was thinking of starports.

[klauss]

Elite Strike crew

Or... in its short form... Elite Screw.

(no offence... it's just what I read, when I read quickly, and I LdMAO).

[Halleck]

Hm... I'm not quite sure what we should do for base backgrounds yet. We could do them privateer/VS style with visuals, or we could try to hack up an elite-style text menu.

You could also try your hand at another station if you want, you seem to be good at those.

BTW, I noticed one thing on the new model that could be tweaked... the dents from the greebles are still there covering the center. I tried flattening one out and it didn't go too well, but here is a comparison shot:


Without the greebles, I think just having the dents looks a bit odd. I'll leave it at your discretion, but this LOD would look better without them in my opinion.

[klauss]

Elite-style menues all the way.
It's quite possible, in all versions of VS.

It takes quite a bit of python coding, though.

[Halleck]

What about a hybrid? In lieu of planetary flight, you would be shown a scene of your ship upon docking. You could then click through to the elite base menu.

The central screen could be an image, but the submenus would probably require special coding.

Submenu reference screencaps:
http://eliot.bambi.net/dump/vegastrike/ ... lletin.PNG
http://eliot.bambi.net/dump/vegastrike/ ... rvices.PNG
http://eliot.bambi.net/dump/vegastrike/ ... pstats.PNG
http://eliot.bambi.net/dump/vegastrike/ ... market.PNG
http://eliot.bambi.net/dump/vegastrike/ ... grades.PNG

I don't know the first thing about python. Maybe you could help?

[klauss]

All possible.
I think even servicing is possible... with some caveats.

[chuck_starchaser]

Here's the flattened NDD version:
http://www.deeplayer.com/dan_w/FFE/whee ... tnNDD2.zip
Didn't change the geometry; just moved out the center pieces to flatness, as I'm worried about interfacing with the texture Ryder's working on.

Which station first? You got Coriolis already. I could do Alexblade but I'm not sure what I need to do to have moving parts; I suppose making them subobjects?

(Need cheatcodes for the game, so I can go see the stations... Gee, I don't remember it being so difficult the first time I played it...)

[Halleck]

Thanks!

As for models... what about the Long Range Cruiser?
You could greeble the heck out of that one.

As for stations, maybe a tube or high-tech station? Something without moving parts.

[chuck_starchaser]

Pre-greebling shot...

[SaturnKnts]

chuck, after watching these boards for a month now i just wanted to say wow! you are one talented person. it's amazing to me how fast you do art that people request. i wish i had one ounce of your abilities. keep up the great work on all your different projects.

tim

[chuck_starchaser]

Well, thank you!

But really, so far I've mostly been a bit of a xerox machine. We'll see if it's true talent once I try to come up with something new. As for speed, you got someone like Ryder P. Moses around here, that models AND textures like a pro in no time at all. Yesterday I sent him a PM about the wheel station, asking if he wanted to texture it, and a few hours later he messaged me back with this...



... he called it a quick test

But thanks again. I needed the feedback

[Halleck]

WOW!!!
When can I get my hands on that?

(The cruiser looks nice too )

[Ryder P. Moses]

When it's finished. I haven't done the details yet.

[Halleck]

Looking forward to it.

[Ryder P. Moses]

Just finished the outer ring. Anything in particular you want in?

[Halleck]

Hm.. the windows look great. the brown spots appear to be a bit rusted.. perhaps you can make a color variation? One texture for border systems (rusty looking like this one) and one for core systems (more uniformly colored, perhaps two or three tones of gray) might do the trick.

Also, I'm not so keen on the "honeycomb" panels. They look good up-close, but from far away they appear to be some kind of noise as opposed to an orderly solar panel array.

I'm not quite sure what could be done to change this. You could try changing the diffuse color to dark blue like chuck was talking about. Perhaps changing the size of the honeycomb (or maybe using a different pattern altogether) would work.

Other than that, just be sure that the texture stays compatible with the medium-range LOD (the one without the greebles) and we'll be in good shape.

Oh, and thanks a lot, Ryder!

[klauss]

Looking good... my only worry if this style fits Elite, though. I'll leave that decision to Halleck - as it should be.

Don't worry about the "noisy" look, that's just lack of proper filtering, a problem the game engine won't have.

[chuck_starchaser]

The texture *will* be compatible, because the greebles can be supressed in one shot. They are a separate material. But if you do need an actual mesh without the greebles, I can make one by loading ryder's obj and removing the greebles from it. I'll have to do that to get his uv coords.

You could try changing the diffuse color to dark blue like chuck was talking about.

Not the diffuse; the specular. The diffuse is almost black and should stay so. The more specular a material is, the brighter the specular color, and the darker the diffuse. Pure blue wouldn't look right; maybe 100% blue and 30% green.

The size of the honeycomb cell definitely should get bigger.
Ryder, try my honeycomb textures. Not only they give you a nice gold color but they also have like grey dirt marks on the surface. The little marks are grey in diffuse, black in specular.

And the windows are a bit too bright; they saturate and cause the dark frames between them to disappear as you get farther, due to filtering. Same would happen with the videocard.

Here's an update..



@klauss:
Well, it fits FFE; and the Wheel Station is an FFE station, afaik. Anyhow, klauss, that was a DOS game without the texture mapping sophistication of Doom. But in any case, Ryder is going to do a radiosity baking on the texture, and that's going to lessen the stark contrasts, a bit. And then we'll add a Detail Texture, right?
Also, I wouldn't mind it at all if the ships are simple and the stations complex. Makes perfect sense to me; stations are bigger and should look it.

Oh, yeah, Ryder! Don't forget there's a couple of cabins for traffic control people, above and below the square hole. They are tiny. They need a dot of light behind them, in the glow texture, so they look lit inside.
Also, the central hub looks a bit dark in general; maybe inside the six small cylinders we could have lights? Preferably different colors, like bluish light inside the 2 cabins, and yellow lights in the 6 cylinders.

[Halleck]

Looking good... my only worry if this style fits Elite, though. I'll leave that decision to Halleck - as it should be.

You raise a valid point. I haven't layed down any strict art style guidelines for Elite Strike, although my general preference has been towards simple models and simple textures because they are easy to manage (so far, I've been texturing and UV'ing all of the models myself in Wings.)
A style has evolved out of this... slightly softer looking than the classic elites (due to gentle bevelling on our models) but with similar coloring style to, say, the amiga or acorn elites. I think this style works well for the classic elite ships.

Material from frontier and FFE is a bit more of a grey area when it comes to art style. For instance, I was fine with the relatively complex eagle, and the frontier-style coriolis station, complete with scaffolding.

This new station blows the hinges off everything in our current dataset in terms of detail. Initially, that's why I was a bit concerned that it would fit in well, and chuck created a non-greebled station that I think nestles in with our current ships much better in terms of geometry.

Perhaps you're right, klauss- perhaps the station has grown too complex. I think that this is the direction that Frontier and certainly FFE were headed, with busy textures and as much detail as they could cram in. This would definitely be the way to go if we were making a sequel to FFE, but that's not what Elite Strike is.

I would like Elite Strike to be a kind of WCU to Elite, comprising the ships and flavors from the old and new games in the Elite series. I think that the classic ships might lose some of their low-poly charm if we detail them in excess. On the other side of the token, I don't think that we should be dumbing down designs from Frontier and FFE simply to make them fit with the old ships.

The problem as I see it is "how can I reconcile the simple pre-frontier ships with the innately more complex ships and stations from Frontier and FFE?"

I'm not exactly sure. For now, perhaps it is best to tone down the detail a notch- we are currently exceeding the detail present in Frontier/FFE by leaps and bounds. I'm certainly not opposed to the creation of highly detailed models, but I'm a bit reticent to include such models in Elite Strike as it is today simply because of the current state of the dataset.

As I told chuck earlier, there is certainly potential to use highly detailed models at a future date, depending on the general direction that the project's art style takes.

I apologize if I seem indecisive, but I never gave this matter too much thought before this release. I never dreamed that having models that were too detailed would be an issue I would ever have to consider. But as they say, "when it rains, it pours."

I also would like to say again to chuck and Ryder that I really appreciate your efforts. I know that both of you have had some rather unpleasant run-ins with the VS bureaucracy in recent days, and I don't want this to be a repeat of that experience. I truly would value your (and everyone's) input on this matter.

I hope that you understand- I've never had to make this kind of decision before. I'm trying to adress it as best I can.

[chuck_starchaser]

Well, the greebles are in a separate material, so it takes me no time to produce a greeble-less model, as I did, and will do so again after I have Ryder's .obj with the uv's.

I think the best way about the question is to try the two models and see which goes better.

Like I said to klauss, though, it makes sense that stations be more complex than ships. They ARE bigger. And we're talking like 50 times the size of a small ship, linearly, which means 2500 times more surface area. Naturally there should be *a lot* more detail to a station than to a fighter, 2500 times as much for a given minimum detail size, in theory.

I can picture flying a low poly ship like the Cobra you showed me into a very detailed station, and I find the mental image quite agreeable with me. Why not?

But like I said, you won't know for sure till you try it. That will answer your question.

[Halleck]

Indeed, seeing it firsthand will shed some light on the matter.

How does this sound: the base texture of the station should be made to match up approximately with the detail level of the middle LOD. Then, detail texturing can be used to increase the detailing for the top-level LOD. (Or is this too complex? I'm not familiar with detail textures.)

However it is managed, we can do a direct comparison by putting the middle LOD/texture and the top-level LOD/texture in game at the same time.

Ryder, is this sounding reasonable to you? I'd rather not make you do work that we will wind up not using, so we should probably discuss this a bit first, unless you don't mind the possibility.

[chuck_starchaser]

Haha... No, the "detail texture" I mentioned has nothing to do with detail, really, it's just a tiling pattern of grain or noise with higher resolution than the normal texture, but smaller size, as it tiles across. The purpose of it is so that you don't see pixelation as you get closer to the thing. As you approach the thing, the "detail texture" starts to kick in, and you see like tiny graininess on the surface, making it look more real and hiding the filtering artifacts from zooming into the main texture. You'd want it regardless which "LOD" model you use. Here's one I made:



Yeah, I would agree the inside of the outer ring texture is a bit too busy.

Ryder, I was thinking, maybe some kind of square grid embossed pattern



multiplying a brush metal texture might be better there, and maybe using the same dark metal texture you used for the central hub, on all the greebles. Not sure if it's easy for you to texture the greebles separately. You could move them along Z. If you have a way to select material 2, you can move by 3 units along Z, texture them and move them back in.