New Hornet model

Discuss the Wing Commander Series and find the latest information on the Wing Commander Universe privateer mod as well as the standalone mod Wasteland Incident project.
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DualJoe
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Post by DualJoe »

Ok I've finished one try at normal- and displacement-maps of both LOD's with the suggested changes. I'll make one more set and then I'll post the lot.

I've only done the normalmaps and heightmaps so would you like the diff- and specmaps to be included in this package?

EDIT
Download here [13,8M]
I've included the obj-files and the blend-files.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

One of the Blender devs recommended me this latest build:
http://www.graphicall.org/builds/index.php
At least he says one of the bugs I mentioned he fixed in it, a week ago.
(That was: Blender crashing after marking sharp edges.)

EDIT:
Multiple UV's are going to be in cvs in a couple of days, tho.
http://www.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10105
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Post by DualJoe »

Ahhh, that's why I couldn't find it, thanks for the heads up.

The new texturebake feature is nice and fast, Doesn't do high->low however.
Hopefully the multiple-UV will allow baking from one unwrap to the other.

What's odd is that I have to convert the model to tris otherwise it won't work correctly.

I'm experimenting with the baking feature, I'll use it to make the textures for the current engine.

EDIT
I've finished the diff- and specmap for the high-poly version.
Does the current engine allow for different uv and seperate textures for LODS?
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

When Brad Mick was tutoring me with modelling, I asked him about the quads/tris question, and he said he kept two files for each model, one all tris, one all quads, and I can't remember the exact rationale for it, and certainly normal map baking wasn't in the equation, but it still made sense. Tris are hard to work with, but all quads become tris, sooner or later, so might as well do it sooner and have control of which way each quad turns into tris. Sometimes it makes all the difference in how a surface shades. But as to how it would affect the normal mapper I've no idea. I would think it would turn quads into tris automatically and transparently.
Splitting vertices along mirroring planes I do see how it could relate to tangents, though, and I have like a dozen mirroring planes in my gun turret. I wonder if I'm supposed to split them all...
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Post by DualJoe »

I replaced the llama with my set and here's how she looks in Vegastrike.

Image Image Image

Haven't got a clue how to do stuff like lights, subunits and glass. Give me a hollar and I'll post the files.

I haven't done the LODs yet, because I don't know if vegastrike will accept different textures for each LOD.
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Post by klauss »

Shiny.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Looks like a really solid ship. Congrats. And that's without GI, paralax, self-shadowing... Wait till we get klauss' shaders...

For glass I don't know. For lights, check the Caernaven. There's a "Caernaven_GLO.png" or some such there, in the current WCU distribution. I didn't use any baking methods for it, just pure Gimp work, but I got engine glow to show on the side of the main box, as well as self-shadowing, and it looks very real. I also got the windows to look almost like real windows by a combination of soft glow gradients and specularity. There's no alpha transparency in it at all. And I even got infrared heat coming out of the radiators on the sides :D
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Post by DualJoe »

klauss wrote:Shiny.
Now that you mention it.

There's something wrong with "Reflective per pixel lighting" even with the added line in the config. I can use completely black specmaps and still the ships will look like mirrors The only way I can get specularity to work is if I set "Specular per pixel lighting". All of a sudden I'm seeing some impressive artwork on the Clydesdale and the Plowshare.
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Post by klauss »

DualJoe wrote:There's something wrong with "Reflective per pixel lighting" even with the added line in the config. I can use completely black specmaps and still the ships will look like mirrors The only way I can get specularity to work is if I set "Specular per pixel lighting". All of a sudden I'm seeing some impressive artwork on the Clydesdale and the Plowshare.
That's odd, for this is how I see them with Reflective Per Pixel + specmap_with_reflections:

Image

TIP: Specular color modulates specularity, but not environment reflections. You should, as a rule of thumb, pretty much stick to Material's specular color to white, and let specmap do the rest. Fact is, specularity tends to be brighter than environment reflections in reality, but since the engine doesn't handle that you can't achieve it if not with white specular colors at the material level. There are uses of the Material's specular color, but always start with white and then try others (I used tinted specularity for some asteroid models, for instance, and it looks great - also, low specular exponentes, <15, may look better with a darker-than-white specularity at the material level).
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Post by DualJoe »

That's not what it looks like on my screen, but now I know the problem lies on my end, thanks. I can't get rid of the extreme envmap, I guess it' s time to replace my config.
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Post by DualJoe »

OT
I just had an idea. Factions should not be represented only by paintjobs, but also by technology and tradition. What I'm getting at is that maybe we should make a library of common parts/features either as models or as stamp-like heightmaps.
Stuff like engines, engineparts, force-field-generators/projectors should have some uniformity/coherence across the fleet.

I don't suggest using anything from the hornet. It's only an experiment of mine to learn how to texture and what I can do with normalmaps and struggling with mirroring. I'm satisfied with the way I did the armorplating and the rivets, but there's no point in sharing those. What really bothers me is stuff like the grill at the back, the hatches and the thing right behind the cockpit. Details like that can be made in advance and shared across the models, just make sure that you adjust the scale of the details according to the size of the model. It will also give a sense of scale that I feel is missing at the moment, because there's nothing to compare the ships with relative to each other.

Come to think of it, the only space-sim that gave me a real sense of scale was I-war and they did exactly that. They used similar features on different ships. I still think that game did a lot of things right. It even had space-elevators, proper flight dynamics, interaction between ships and objects through computers and docking, a complex damage model and a brilliant solution for space-dust. It had the hud draw lines to indicate your (relative) speed. The hud also painted a staircase path behind ships indicating it's (relative)speed and direction of flight. To bad the studio went bust. Come to think of it, almost every gamestudio I had high hopes is gone now. Maybe that's why commercial games nowadays are crap, brainfarts with shiny screenshots. :( Now I'm depressed. Guess I'll just have to kill my friends a couple of times on ET. :twisted:
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

The HUD drawing lines in space is a feature that's been proposed and asked for, at Features Requests, multiple times; but the way it works with Vegastrike is that they do whatever they want, and then push it up your nose; like multiplayer: witness spiritplumber calling Hellcat "the boss" in the other thread...
spiritplumber wrote:WCU _is_ very buggy on the grounds that I've been asked by hellcatv to focus on multiplayer, and he's the boss when it comes down to it.
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... 4604#74604

That's partly why I'm starting to develop my own engine.
http://www.deeplayer.com/doku/doku.php
http://deeplayer.com/phpBB2/
Just discussions and planning so far; coding starts in the new year.

That's a really good idea, to have faction-specific greebles. We could have a model that is NOT a ship, but just a collection of greebles, for a given faction, and resides in the video card most of the time; and then, ships and stations of that faction could call up resources from that model.
I'll be sure to add this capability to Deeplayer3D. Thanks!
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Post by klauss »

chuck_starchaser wrote:The HUD drawing lines in space is a feature that's been proposed and asked for, at Features Requests, multiple times; but the way it works with Vegastrike is that they do whatever they want, and then push it up your nose
First... it's like that with any OpenSource development.
Really. Ideas may or may not interest the developers. If they do, it gets done. If not, it doesn't. What's so bad about it?
Anyway... the HUD drawing lines in space does have a few issues with frames of reference. I remember an interesting similar concept with Elite, that it drew a corridor towards your AP target. If you didn't target anything, you didn't see anything. It makes sense that way, doesn't it?
But we'd need a lot more flexibility on the engine to code such stuff properly.
I'm working on some stuff that could add required flexibility, but RL does not allow progress to go too fast.
I personally don't like the "synthethic space dust" option very much, but I guess it's possible and neat to have a few options, toggleable in some way. Real avionics never have only one way of representing information, so it'd make things more real-like to have alternatives.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Certainly the Elite way is right --sans the space crap. Speed is relative...
One of the features I'm planning to have is very much related to the switching of coordinate systems. While in space you'll see dots that are stationary relative to the star's orbit. As you approach a planet (its gravity becomes more significant than the sun's), the dots change to dots that are fixed relative to planetary orbits; --i.e. the dots orbit the planet in circular orbits as if they were moons or satellites; that way you know your speed relative to something at least somewhat relevant (orbital velocity on the ecliptic). Or something like that; haven't thought through the details yet.

Anyways, as always, my comments are about VS devs that preceded you, Klauss; you're the only VS dev that "listens to the customers"; but you're just one guy and can't do everything. As for whether it's the way it is with every OS project, that's hard to say. But what I see here, down at the objective level, is a whole bunch of mods dead in the water for lack of engine support. The only successful mod ever was PR, but only because VS-the-game was conceptually based on PR. VS-the-game invading every aspect of the engine, though, makes life just too difficult for the other mods:

For a StarTrek mod to work, it would need a second engine for ground and ship walking. For a Fronteer mod to work it would need a different kind of universe generator, a 3D gui at bases, a different (and better) auto-pilot, and last but not least, seamless planetary landings and takeoffs. For a StarWars mod it would need walkable ship and base interiors and planets, as well as atmospheric flight. And for WCU, the VS engine needs to support movies, and multiple choice conversations. And NONE of these things are even being worked on!!! Meanwhile they (not you, Klauss) are wasting precious time on multiplayer crap that no mods ever asked for --not even VS-the-game, unless they did so on IRC--; and if that weren't enough, they force spiritplumber to change plans and develop WCU multiplayer; neglecting the work that needs to be done.
That's gotta take some nerve...

What I think happens with better OS projects is that they develop under a truly open atmosphere. Good, clear coding standards are part of their "culture", and with clear code, there's always the possibility of a fork. And this keeps the devs true and honest. In this case, however, the project is only OS is name, because the VS engine is too obfuscated for anyone to be able to fork it, which gives the devs (not speaking of you) a sense of security that should not be there. Anyways, enough bashing; I just wanted to let Dual know that he's not alone, feeling opressed.
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Post by klauss »

Moving OT, not Hornet-related, but...
chuck_starchaser wrote:The only successful mod ever was PR, but only because VS-the-game was conceptually based on PR.
Probably so very true.
But, defending Devs, it's really hard to get a good-for-all engine. Even a good-for-many-things one.
Like - walkable bases. Totally different techniques. Really, a LOT of work has to go into that. I find it totally understandable if, the real goal was Privateer, that would get neglected.
chuck_starchaser wrote:And for WCU, the VS engine needs to support movies, and multiple choice conversations. And NONE of these things are even being worked on!!!
Let me refute that:
A) Movies: being worked on. How does xvid sound?
B) Multiple-choice conversations: already existing, but a bit cumbersome. An easier-to-use interface is being worked on just as well.
chuck_starchaser wrote:and if that weren't enough, they force spiritplumber to change plans and develop WCU multiplayer; neglecting the work that needs to be done.
Hm... there's one task that needs spirit. AI.
I would love to implement some ideas for AI but I really don't know where to start. The AI system on VS is totally awkward. I would very much like to help there, but with this awkwardness I never know how my changes will ripple. I need a sourcemap. Spirit knows that source.
I would very much love it if she could take the time to write the sourcemap. I do think that's more important than multiplayer. AI is too inflexible right now - sure, there's python AI, but it's unusably slow. Sure, there's XML "behaviors", but nobody knows how to use them (I bet because they have awkward and unintuitive semantics - but can't put my finger on it because I don't fully understand them).
In short - spirit and her knowledge is needed there. There are (a tiny few) others that can work on networking, but none that can work on AI. Just a long answer to "what needs to be done".
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

klauss wrote:Moving OT, not Hornet-related, but...
Well, Dual himself started with an explicitly OT post... ;-)
chuck_starchaser wrote:The only successful mod ever was PR, but only because VS-the-game was conceptually based on PR.
Probably so very true.
But, defending Devs, it's really hard to get a good-for-all engine. Even a good-for-many-things one.
That's very true too; but then again, that's why writing an "engine" is supposed to be really hard. The VS Open Source engine, by the same token, is neither open source (too obscure and undocumented), nor an "engine".
Like - walkable bases. Totally different techniques. Really, a LOT of work has to go into that. I find it totally understandable if, the real goal was Privateer, that would get neglected.
Shouldn't be really that hard. Take the Blender3D engine, for instance, and have a switch. Not telling YOU to do it. I could probably do this myself; though I want seamlessness, which is why I'm going my own way. But I'm just trying to say, there's 0 (zero) willingness to support mods by devs other than you, here. In fact, the only mod Hellcat showed any interest on was Firefly, his own idea, and rather than do the work of posting at freshmeat to get developers, he tried to take them away from the other mods, like he tried to steal me away from WCU, --making me a moderator at the Firefly forum but not here at WCU, where I had my greater commitment. And I HATE manipulation, if you know what I mean.
chuck_starchaser wrote:And for WCU, the VS engine needs to support movies, and multiple choice conversations. And NONE of these things are even being worked on!!!
Let me refute that:
A) Movies: being worked on. How does xvid sound?
B) Multiple-choice conversations: already existing, but a bit cumbersome. An easier-to-use interface is being worked on just as well.
Let me guess by "worked on" you mean they are in your personal to-do list. I know you want to do a lot of good things, but can you do it all? Where's all the rest of them devs?
chuck_starchaser wrote:and if that weren't enough, they force spiritplumber to change plans and develop WCU multiplayer; neglecting the work that needs to be done.
Hm... there's one task that needs spirit. AI.
I would love to implement some ideas for AI but I really don't know where to start. The AI system on VS is totally awkward. I would very much like to help there, but with this awkwardness I never know how my changes will ripple. I need a sourcemap. Spirit knows that source.
I would very much love it if she could take the time to write the sourcemap. I do think that's more important than multiplayer. AI is too inflexible right now - sure, there's python AI, but it's unusably slow. Sure, there's XML "behaviors", but nobody knows how to use them (I bet because they have awkward and unintuitive semantics - but can't put my finger on it because I don't fully understand them).
In short - spirit and her knowledge is needed there. There are (a tiny few) others that can work on networking, but none that can work on AI. Just a long answer to "what needs to be done".
Spirit, are you reading?
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Post by spiritplumber »

Meep. :oops: I'm not THAT good! What I've been doing lately is tweaking the existing AI to get it to behave more WC-like (sent something to Gemini Gold in that respect), but haven't really touched the code... this said, I'm probably going to be a LOT more capable in the near future when it comes to AI.

Why? Because I'm designing one for a real-life UAV! If I can get that thing to work for real, making something work in a game should be easier right?

Sorry for the bragging, I'm happy that we got a fairly major milestone accomplished Monday ^^;

Other than that... Let me take the GRE today and I'll mess around with some stuff. I can't fly home for Thanksgiving, so it's a long weekend of being bored unless I find some code to burrow into :)
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Post by klauss »

spiritplumber wrote:Meep. :oops: I'm not THAT good! What I've been doing lately is tweaking the existing AI to get it to behave more WC-like (sent something to Gemini Gold in that respect), but haven't really touched the code...
Doesn't matter. You understand how it works.
I can't even figure out what the roles and events are supposed to mean exactly. I get a general picture, but can't master the details. What intuitively comes to my mind is proven nonsense when I read the scripts - interpreted under those assumptions, the scripts make no sense. But they do work, therefore the assumptions are wrong.
spiritplumber wrote:Why? Because I'm designing one for a real-life UAV! If I can get that thing to work for real, making something work in a game should be easier right?
Sorry, no.
Games need AIs that make decisions in a split-second, for the same computer needs to run dozens or hundreds of such AIs in parallel. It's an entirely different matter. But surely insights obtained from working on real AIs help.

spiritplumber wrote:Sorry for the bragging, I'm happy that we got a fairly major milestone accomplished Monday ^^;
Hey... we're also delighted to hear that. No need to be sorry for being proud of your work, right?
chuck_starchaser wrote:Let me guess by "worked on" you mean they are in your personal to-do list. I know you want to do a lot of good things, but can you do it all? Where's all the rest of them devs?
Depends on the task.
Movies, it's in progress... slow progress because RL is Real Sucker (of time) at this point, but yes, only me. Problem is, almost nobody else knows the details of the graphic subsystem to implement that (it's a part of the graphic subsystem I myself implemented to get Privateer's intro).
It's a smallish task, I'm mostly struggling to get portability and seamless sound with it.
About the other stuff, there's two of us. Yap.
One guy that posted here once I think, AzureSky, is helping out with Gemini Gold to get decent user interfaces. He's building things based on my GUI library (that python library I was talking about some day, to abstract out what the Ogre version will implement with CEGUI), so we're collaborating to get a decen, usable interface framework. Dialogues are in the list, though low priority (a lot of ground has to be covered first). But even now, those dialogues would be a ton easier to implement with the tools we've been creating.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Hehehe... I used Cegui once, for that little PCB CAD demo I did. If I were to do it again, I'd use Assembler :D ... That was as enjoyable a trip as I imagine a lobotomy without anesthesia... But it worked, in the end; and I guess there's nothing else out there.

EDIT:
Allright gentlemen, I will go silent now for about a week or so. Company I work for is moving, and I have to start packing my office, and if I stay online I'll keep procrastinating. So, offline I go. Later.
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Post by DualJoe »

In the meantime I've made my first normalmapped and depthmapped stamp and I'm thinking of using it just behind the cockpit instead of those weird rectangle shapes. According to the blueprint there should be a round shield generator there.
Image
It's still a WIP, because this one can't be mirrored yet. I'm considering a mountingbracket which will make this thing usable on a mirroredge.

The fun thing about this stamp is that you can use it like a brush in the Gimp and paint it anywhere you'd like. If we make a bunch of these brushes greebling ships will be a breeze.

EDIT
Some more ideas for shieldgenerator-greeble-stamps. With the addition of PRT-maps these should look realistic enough. To bad that parallax-mapping doesn't work on glowmaps.
Image Image
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Post by DualJoe »

Thanks and welcome back, those greebles are a nice finger exercise too.
Haven't done much and I'm coming down with a nasty flu on top of being miserable with all the medication I'm taking for my eye.

I finally gave up trying to figure it out mirrorproblems in the normalmap and while surfing the web on the subject I found this
Especially interesting is the last part where he shows the mixed smoothed-unsmoothed approach in DOOM3.
Here I was thinking normalmapping couldn't handel edges.
It also means that I'll finally be able to remove all the bevels for the ingame-high-def-model and have normalmapping handle that part. This will drop the tri-count considerably for complex-geometry.
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Post by klauss »

How interesting...
I should try to make a mesher module to generate those tangents, and export them so that you can bake with them.
But I'm too busy now - please, feel free to remind me later if I forget.
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Post by spiritplumber »

That looks really shiny, could we use it for other "intakes"?
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Post by DualJoe »

Yes, you can use these for anything you want. I'll post them if anybody is interested.

Those greebles are just some random doodles.
My original idea was to make a couple of gimp-brushes to quickly paint on these details. If that doesn't work I can always append the details to a high-poly version and bake the details to a lowpoly one.

Chuck came up with the database idea for having uniform objects and parts in a database and maybe even incorporate them as sub-units in the engine.

Maybe start a thread where everybody can post their brush-like greebles. Their easy to do and fun as well, but they could save a lot of time in the final stages of greebling your models.
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