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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Post by spiritplumber »

>_>


<_<


does it make sense to continue working on this then? ^_^;;;
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

That's the million dollar question. We could beat the crap out of Infinity, but the political will has to be there. I was arguing for realism on these boards for years, and at best I got the silent treatment, when I wasn't booed off stage with the old "fun is more important than realism" crap argument. So, others, like the Infinity guys, are going for realism; and we'll see whether the world agrees with VS's upper echelons, that non-realism is more fun than realism.

VS still has time on its side, because Infinity is not open source; but there are other projects coming up, besides Infinity. And while most projects out there are striving for modularity and elegance in the code, VS's code is all over the place. Naming conventions non-existent... there's fog and there's fawg, and neither is even related to fog; and there's fly by wire, unrelated to flying by wire or the F16 in any way; and there's floats initialized to 0 instead of 0.0f, just to confuse the reader; and there are parameters that have special meanings when they are zero or negative; and there's just no way to figure out where anything happens because wherever a piece of code happens to be written, historically, that's where it will stay; whether it belongs there or not. You can't understand how one part of the engine works without understanding how another dozen parts work. You just have to know the engine, period, to work with it. Compare that to Ogre: Some people were asking for scalability of particle systems. Simbad, the maintainer, said to them he had no time to do it; so I did it in two evenings. I only had to look at three classes to figure out what needed to be done. But if the VS engine mainteiners are more interested in adding more stuff, like multiplayer, than in cleaning up the code, fixing bugs... in a word, *maintaining* it, nobody else can do that for them.
They'd probably shoot me if they could, but I'm just the messenger of sad truth, and I hope they get the message before all the VS mods start porting out to other engines. Because that's what's going to happen when something better comes along. Anyways, got stuff to do and I'm getting worked up...
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Post by mkruer »

@spiritplumber
There is always a reason to continue to work on VS. I don’t know about you, but I do it because I enjoy it, even if I bitch and moan sometimes.

@chuck_starchaser
I won’t even pretend how VS works anymore. I do know that its needs to be documented and I do agree that the source code need to be reviewed. At this point it might be wise for a rewrite of the physic engine. Once Ogre is in place this can be the next great project, but I am not a programmer, so its not my call. On the Modular front, i think we have been moving this was for a while, but we haven’t seen any tangible examples. Going back to Ogre, I believe Klauss is implementing it in a modular fashion so it can easily be updated and without having to do another rewrite. This should allow us to release fixes to the graphics portion of the engine much more easily.

As for general bugs. Don’t ask how but I have only have VS crash once on me in recent memory. Most of the other “bugsâ€
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

mkruer wrote:I do know that its needs to be documented and I do agree that the source code need to be reviewed.
Exactly.
At this point it might be wise for a rewrite of the physic engine.
100%.
Once Ogre is in place this can be the next great project
That's what I'm hoping.
On the Modular front, i think we have been moving this was for a while, but we haven’t seen any tangible examples.
One thing that needs to be modularized is the physics. See below.
Going back to Ogre, I believe Klauss is implementing it in a modular fashion so it can easily be updated and without having to do another rewrite. This should allow us to release fixes to the graphics portion of the engine much more easily.
Klauss' work is outstanding; no question about that.
As for general bugs. Don’t ask how but I have only have VS crash once on me in recent memory. Most of the other “bugsâ€
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Post by mkruer »

We should put this up for debate whether or not we should abandon the original engine altogether. I am not a programmer so I have no say as far as I am concerned, but I see the point of deprecating the current project and favor of making a new one with all the experiences we have gained over the past few years. I know that a lot of open source project are trying to reinventing themselves because they have become obsolete because everything else has changed.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Well, I'm not saying it needs a rewrite from scratch... though, come to think of it... I donno; but re-factoring is what I meant. Everything having to do with shields in 1 class or in a package having a single class serving as interface with the rest of the engine.
Same thing with radar/sensors. Same thing with autopilot; and the same code used for autopilot for the player used for AI's.
Defining packages and their intefaces, where an interface is what a package, or system of classes, presents to the rest of the engine; and the other classes in the package are private and hidden. Interfaces are minimal and comprehensible. If a boolean (true or false) needs to be passed along with a floating point quantity, then it's passed along with it as a boolean, rather than as a special number in the quantity, like -1.0 to mean not-used or not applicable.
But first and foremost, all that proliferation of difficulty setting boiler plate if then else statements that pollute and invade the engine at every level have to go. Otherwise nobody, except perhaps klauss, will ever be able to help them much, much less work with the engine to make their own mod behave exactly the way they want it to.
The Turing test is this: If a programmer who knows nothing about the engine is shown a class, can she tell what the class is for and what it does?
I look at any class in the Ogre engine and I know immediately what it is for, what it does when why and where, as well as how. And their implementations only span a page or two. I'd bet 90% of the VS code is never used; seen classes with like 20 pages worth of code...
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Post by Zeog »

@chuck: Yes, I did look at infinity. The first time was like about that time we were discussing that hierarchical seed system. Since then I've been collecting quite a number of projects doing similar things, some of them are open source or BSD licensed. But infinity is not realistic in the sense that you could exactly model reality. It's just very believeable and models many details. The developer says that himself in the FAQ. (Most people don't recognize reality anyway as they ignore all the lovely little details and don't observe reality that well in order to recognize it.)

I agree, that the VS code is a mess. I've sent some hours reading the code, for example to find out where the cargo graphics path name is stripped from the cargo description string. That workaround alone is unbelieveable. I also second that a complete rewrite would probably be quicker than teaking this mess, but I've seen quite a few projects that died because of years without change as devs were "restructuring" and "rewriting" the code.
A point that made me a little sad is, that those people who do lots of programming and changing in the VS engine, never show up in the forums to discuss anything about that. klauss, I'm not talking of you. It feels a little like a private party where one is allowed to participate by looking through the window. So to speak, the VS code complexity protects it from contributions... I don't want to blame anyone, that's just an impression I got lately.
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Post by mkruer »

Well the good thing about open source is that we don’t have to rewrite the program. We could simply borrow from other open source engines. Example: Need orbital mechanics? Get the source code from a project like Celistia.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

@mkruer:
Yes, and in fact, a lot of space game projects I've come across have been feeding on Celestia's stuff. There's one Ogre-based game that is like an orbiting space station graphical design tool. I've seen a space based RTS and a couple of space RPG projects based on Celestia, too. I don't know anything about Celestia, myself, though; what language is it written with?

@Zeog: You're right, I read all the stuff at the Infinity website, and there are things I don't like about it. Well, right there in the demo they have a terrestrial planet a stone-throw away from a gas giant :D :D :D
And that's part of the reason I said we could beat the crap out of them: They are going for more realism; but just a bit more; we could go much further.
Yeah, I do think, not just a rewrite, but a good, object oriented re-design is what is called for. And unlike the mind-set of "making a game", designing with the mind-set of "making an engine". Clear, self-documenting code.
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Post by z30 »

chuck_starchaser wrote: @Zeog: You're right, I read all the stuff at the Infinity website, and there are things I don't like about it. Well, right there in the demo they have a terrestrial planet a stone-throw away from a gas giant :D :D :D

And that's part of the reason I said we could beat the crap out of them: They are going for more realism; but just a bit more; we could go much further.
Yeah, I do think, not just a rewrite, but a good, object oriented re-design is what is called for. And unlike the mind-set of "making a game", designing with the mind-set of "making an engine". Clear, self-documenting code.
And that I think is the crux of the matter. When you talk about realism in the space adventure genre it's not just accurate rendition of planets, stars and spacecraft (fictional as those might be).

You need some basic understanding of physics, astrophysics, social & economic dynamics plus strong storylines and a vivid imagination.

There's a very good reason why Privateer never had a true successor or why anything like WCU ever came into being much earlier.

You need the right mix, otherwise it all doesn't hang together as well and you end up with things that suddenly break your immersion (re: Zeog's comment).

As an aside I just visited the game quite prominently mentioned on WCNews, SpaceForce2. 99% of the ships are fighters and whatever merchant ships are there are obviously sitting ducks (and ugly as hell).

After several years of Starwars and the advent of the Millenium Falcon, and almost as long after Privateer originally came out - the concept of hybrid ships that can succeed in an open ended scenario is still something that has to sink into the minds of majority of space game designers.

To be fair, SpaceForce looks like a good game - but it's more like a continuation of Privateer 2. And anyone who knows the history of the development of that game knows it almost completely unrelated to the original.
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Post by mkruer »

chuck_starchaser wrote:@mkruer:
Yes, and in fact, a lot of space game projects I've come across have been feeding on Celestia's stuff. There's one Ogre-based game that is like an orbiting space station graphical design tool. I've seen a space based RTS and a couple of space RPG projects based on Celestia, too. I don't know anything about Celestia, myself, though; what language is it written with?
Celestia itself is written in C++, It also uses its own in-house rendering engine. But what I like about it, is it is extremely cleanly coded. Even I can look at the code and know generally what it is doing. As a matter of fact if you want a quick port for orbits, look at the orbits.h file. In it is everything to properly move an object around a focus of an ellipse, and correctly render the speed of that object during its orbit.

Celestia itself is not is not good for games mainly because its quality no matter the cost towards FPS, but it still renders things very well. Still a great source for some really inspiring ideas

Galaxy rendering:
http://shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=77804

Atmosphere Rendering:
http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9891

Alternate Photometric Functions:
http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9853

Cube Maps: (This one might be obsolete, due to Klauss implementation in Ogre)
http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10000
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

z30 wrote:When you talk about realism in the space adventure genre it's not just accurate rendition of planets, stars and spacecraft (fictional as those might be). You need some basic understanding of physics, astrophysics, social & economic dynamics plus strong storylines and a vivid imagination.
Exactly. And people may say that most people won't know the difference between realism or the lack thereof; but realism has benefits that go beyond pleasing the knowledgeable: Many people who don't know that most stars can't have terrestrial planets in them will probably get a gut feeling of unreality if you make every system have one. But most of all, the consistency. If you bend reality here and there, I believe chances are you'll trip on the wrinkles later on. Not that one can't have deviations from reality; but it's best to keep them few, isolated, and well documented.
There's a very good reason why Privateer never had a true successor or why anything like WCU ever came into being much earlier.
You need the right mix, otherwise it all doesn't hang together as well and you end up with things that suddenly break your immersion (re: Zeog's comment).
Yeah, we're gonna change that. Right Spirit?
To be fair, SpaceForce looks like a good game - but it's more like a continuation of Privateer 2. And anyone who knows the history of the development of that game knows it almost completely unrelated to the original.
Right on the dot. Privateer 2 was actually a good game in many ways. I particularly enjoyed the story and taking the train in Crius, and walking to places, even if it wasn't 1st person 3D. But it lacked balance: Way too many pirates to be a believable universe. The story starting too soon, also. It was a revelation to me when I first played Privateer 1, that there was actually a story to it. I was already doing the Oxford missions when I began to realize this was going to be a full story. ;-) Privateer 2 kind of kills the suspense, by comparison. And its usiverse was a bit too small, and its side-stories would repeat, and it was full of bugs...

@mkruer:
Good links, thank you. I'll take a look at Celestia.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Gosh! If you liked orbit.h, you should look at orbit.cpp. It's so neatly coded it reads like poetry.
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Post by mkruer »

.h .cpp its all C to me?
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

the .h or .hpp file is the "header" file; only declarations there; --what a class advertises to the world: "I can do this, I can do that." but without telling the world how it does it. It's just the names of the functions.

The .cpp file has the actual code; the actual implementation of how a class does its things. It's like the hidden parts of a class; where the functions are defined.

I wonder, what's wrong with Celestia? What's so difficult about putting ships in and make a game out of it? Seems pretty fast on my machine.
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Post by klauss »

That's a problem, because it's C++ ;) :p

Chuck... I'll postpone the physics rework a bit - sorry, but it depends on the Ogre SceneManager work I was doing, so I'll finish that first.

The idea is to get a neatly modularized physics subsystem, I talked about it with both Daniel and Jack, and though they somewhat agreed, there wasn't much of a difference with the current system without serious physics work. But, with the interpolation enhancement, I could do some serious enhancements to the physics system if I were to use my idea, so I'll try coding both after the SceneManager is done - why? Because my idea can use the culling power of the SceneManager to greatly enhance simulation selectiveness - that is, simulate more accurately what the player can see, and leave the rest just a good approximation. The SceneManager uses a structure that can quickly sort that out, and report the "visible" changes, and so I need to have that structure well polished before doing the physics stuff.

If you feel strongly about the subject, though, I could bargain on the simpler stuff for now, and enhance the interpolation alone - but that's wasting potential, since a C2 interpolation opens up a world of accuracy which cannot be taken advantage of with the current framework (namely, I need to be able to say: this path is good for up to n seconds, unless someone interacts with the guy <- bolded part is unimplementable without my structure).

.hpp, AFAIK, are also implementations. I think the standard is to name them .hpp when there are template bodies which should be hidden, but cannot because the compiler needs them at instantiation time.
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Post by mkruer »

mkruer wrote:.h .cpp its all C to me?
Apparently my sarcastic humor doesn’t translate well over text. :lol:
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Klauss, I wasn't pressuring you; or at least, I didn't intend to. That sounds like a good idea; the scene manager thing. I thought hpp was just a boost ideosincracy. Thanks for that info. I'm just wondering now why one couldn't add shaders and collision detection to Celestia and turn it into a game engine... Or just take the orbital code and bring it into an Ogre based engine. I might try some experiments.
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Post by mkruer »

I don’t know the particulars of it but Chris the Celestia lead, said something to the affect it was not designed for it but never went into any details. I do know however that he doesn’t support the idea of making into a simulator. At this point in time he will not even add gravity, or gravitation effects to the project. Although a lot of people have asked him to add mass as an object field.

BTW. One thing that I though would be cool in a game is what if all objects were bound to gravitational principals. The planets orbits would change slightly do to the effects of other objects. The oblivious problem is that multi point gravitation simulation requires massive computing power to be mostly accurate, and even then our understanding of gravity is incomplete. Take some the moons of Saturn’s, run a simulation on them and even the most accurate models blow up after a few years.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Exactly; simulation incurrs precision errors at each step; it would never equal the precision of just using orbital functions like ellipses and stuff, all representations being equal. Where simulation would be good for is ships, obviously.
Adding gravity to Celestia planets is a no-brainer. I can do that in an evening.
Getting the damned thing to compile is another story; VC 7.1 is not accepting the project files. I'll try the CVS download.
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Post by klauss »

Gravitation formulas incurr in an error just as well - the only difference is that, inaccurate and all, they are stable. Simulation isn't always stable in the presence of numerical errors.

Anyway... I bet a combination of both is more than enough for us. Simulation during online* gameplay, just to simplify the model (having a hybrid simulation-for-some, formula-derived-path-for-others is a tad messy), and formulas for offline time passing simulation.

* Online/offline: when you're flying happily all over the place - the system you're in is "online", the rest are "offline".
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Yeah, the only problem with that is if there will ever be multiple players 24 hours. I think I'd rather use orbits for planets, moons and space stations and other non-self-propelled, orbiting craft; and simulation for the rest. Orbits only need maybe one recalculation per second and interpolation between; though I guess it can't just be linear interpolation if you're going to land on an orbiting space station; but then again, I'd probably switch world coordinate systems to the space station, on approach. That'd be my solution, anyways.
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Post by z30 »

chuck_starchaser wrote:
To be fair, SpaceForce looks like a good game - but it's more like a continuation of Privateer 2. And anyone who knows the history of the development of that game knows it almost completely unrelated to the original.
Right on the dot. Privateer 2 was actually a good game in many ways. I particularly enjoyed the story and taking the train in Crius, and walking to places, even if it wasn't 1st person 3D. But it lacked balance: Way too many pirates to be a believable universe. The story starting too soon, also. It was a revelation to me when I first played Privateer 1, that there was actually a story to it. I was already doing the Oxford missions when I began to realize this was going to be a full story. ;-) Privateer 2 kind of kills the suspense, by comparison. And its usiverse was a bit too small, and its side-stories would repeat, and it was full of bugs...

@mkruer:
Good links, thank you. I'll take a look at Celestia.
I just paid a long visit to the Relic & CiC thread re: Homeworld WC 4 mod. They're encountering a lot of problems with the Homeworld engine - it's not really geared to simulate the WC or PR universe.

* the shields wouldn't work reliably, in many ship types it would end up making the ship turrets useless. the developers ended up making the hull compensate for the lack of shields.

Even then, capships ended up being massacred in test runs.

* the missiles couldn't be used by the AI ships. While (using a clever trick) players could use them it required very complex programming for the AI ships to do likewise

* because of the scale & distance limitations of the Homeworld engine, speed of capships had to be cut down by half to prevent travel time from being unrealistically short

Even with all the VS engine limitations I've seen being discussed, this kind of inflexibility isn't something I've ever heard being mentioned.

On top of everything, only one of the three main developers are still active. Csazen turns out to be a very young, very smart kid from India who not only had to relocate recently (was forced to vacate his former place) but barely missed being a casualty in the Mumbai train bombings some time ago.

The other two developers either disappeared or had to quit the project due to RL (college in this case).

WCU is it - I don't see any major movement in the other projects though I hope we get to see a WC Saga release sometime soon :)
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Post by spiritplumber »

WCU wise... the main push for me was to do the ships. I'm still all for making WCU happen, but, right now I'd rather focus on helping with multiplayer :)
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Post by z30 »

spiritplumber wrote:WCU wise... the main push for me was to do the ships. I'm still all for making WCU happen, but, right now I'd rather focus on helping with multiplayer :)
I forgot to mention that the major thing with the Homeworld mod was that it was multiplayer, no SP mode.
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