Targ Collective's Autotracking Turrets Pack - Release-Ready!

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 chuck_starchaser »

So, what makes an Orion stronger than a Tarsus then?
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Post by Shissui »

Under the current implementation the Orion has better shields, more weapons & a bigger reactor; but not better armour. If you go through the forums, you will find occasional complaints that the Orion is not what it used to be & disappointment that it is not the flying fortress that it once was.

If I follow you correctly --
You want an *Armour Scale Factor*. ASF would be a property of a ship & stored in the ship record. A value of 0 or absent would be read as 1.0. The ASF is required only when installing Upgrades or when performing repair as a multiplier upon the base protection rating/face of the armour type installed (or about to be installed) to create a revised maximum armour rating. It would not be required while not in port, as the game will trust the armour value present, decrements it by damage taken & rewrites back to the file.

Initial estimates of the ASF for any given ship can be made by taking the average armour value currently assigned to a model & dividing by the value of tungsten armour. This would then be doubled for any fighters that you wanted to change from 4 armour faces to 2 armour faces -- retaining the same protection, but removing the angular discrimination of the target.

To implement this would require relatively little change to the VS engine. However, because it also requires changes to the format of the ship record, these ships would not be reverse compatible with existing ships and would not run in PR 1.2

EDIT: Several thoughts while performing professional duties totally unrelated to gaming:
(1) If the scale factors are placed at the end of the file, then there will still be backward compatibility.
(2) WC Canon says that Demons have weaker side armour than front/back. You may not want to reduce the light fighters to 2 armour facings.
(3) If asymmetric armour is to be retained, then it is a bit more coding, but not a great deal more complex.
Last edited by Shissui on Sat May 19, 2007 5:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Shissui wrote:Under the current implementation the Orion has better shields, more weapons & a bigger reactor; but not better armour. If you go through the forums, you will find occasional complaints that the Orion is not what it used to be & disappointment that it is not the flying fortress that it once was.
Oh dear; that's terrible!
If I follow you correctly --
You want an *Armour Scale Factor*. ASF would be a property of a ship & stored in the ship record. ...
That would be one way to achieve what I was thinking, but the way I would implement it is slightly different: Instead of having an "Armor Scale Factor" for each ship, I would have one for each armor material. And instead of using Tungsten as a scaling reference, I would use Durasteel, --to follow the WC tradition.

In the WC databases, every ship has an official armor thickness, given in units of "cm durasteel equivalent" thickness. If we know what material of armor the ship ships with, we can obtain an actual armor thickness figure.
THAT is what should be listed for each ship in units.csv., as well as the default material. And then we could assume that this actual thickness remains constant as you upgrade armor material.

I'm not sure I'd divide the thickness by the number of armor pieces... Maybe by the square root of it?...
Last edited by chuck_starchaser on Sat May 19, 2007 6:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Shissui »

I am well aware that WC canon provides values for armour in units of durasteel. My suggestion to divide by a Tungsten equivalent is for convenience in obtaining initial estimates for existing ships. Dividing by Tungsten has the advantage that a Centurion ends up with an initial scale factor of 1.

The internal values for some variables and those values that are displayed publicly are not always the same. This would be such a case.

(See also the extra footnotes to my previous post)
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Shissui wrote:I am well aware that WC canon provides values for armour in units of durasteel.
Well, what I'm suggesting is an implementation that is mathematically equivalent to yours, but which avoids having "magic numbers" (ASF) in units.csv, --which magic numbers would have to be documented separately, and might later be tweaked by someone unaware of where the numbers come from.

What I would like is for us to be able to pull the 'durasteel armor units' figures for each ship from WC manuals, and stick them straight, unmodified, into units.csv. Then have the software, at runtime, compute:

1) Actual cm of armor thickness (for this we also need to specify initial armor material for each ship; perhaps using Tungsten as the default, I'm not sure; but anyhow, the software divides the durasteel equivalent figure for each 'side' of the armor by the initial material's strength factor relative to durasteel, in order to obtain a plain 'armor thickness', figure in cm units.

2) Actual strength of present armor: It simply multiplies the 'armor thickness' from the previous computation, by the currently used armor material's strenth factor relative to durasteel, to obtain the final (un-damaged) armor strength, in 'cm durasteel' units.


Given the fact that, as you point out, front back and side figures are given for smaller ships, I'd suggest we just copy those values onto units.csv, but "fix" the larger ships to have 8 armor zones instead of 4; --but without scaling back the thickness... After all, the problem is that large capships are too unrealistically easy to destroy, as things stand.
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Post by targ collective »

I can create a primitive equivalent to this right now, although there may be some overlap between ships. EG a high-thickness base armour could be replaced by a higher-equivalent-strength-but-lower-thickness armour intended for another ship - forbidden upgrades are only supported in SVN at the moment. (Zool has finally spilled the beans on how to create hard limits - I PM'd him about it - so I know enough to make this work now).

If you want this in for the next TurretPack release, or the one after (this one will be a bit of work) I'll need calculations for the surface area of each side of each ship, figures for strength of thickness of armour by area and the armour thickness of each ship. Without those figures I can't do this for you. Although if sustainable damage per side has already been published as canon, I can use those figures instead.

Either way I now know enough, thanks to Zool, to put this concept in-game. And am prepared to do so as soon as I have the base figures for my calculations.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Yes, damage per side is indeed well documented and canonical. Notice, however, that it's not "damage per unit of area" or anything of the sort; it is total damage on the given side. In other words, neither the original games' engine nor the VS engine will model locality of hits over an area. The only area subdivision that is considered is the "sides". So you won't need to worry about area figures.
Notice also that the published figures are always given in units of "cm durasteel equivalent". IOW, they are *hardness* figures; NOT thickness figures. That's why the first step (preferably at runtime, if you know how to mod the code; but otherwise we can do it offline and enter the result in units.csv), would be to divide those figures by the hardness of the initial material relative to durasteel, so as to get actual thickness, measured in cm.
To do that at runtime, we'd need an extra column in units.csv, specifying what the initial material is, though; so maybe we should just forget about it and do it off-line.

So, having figures of cm armor thickness for each side of each ship, in units.csv, we can multiply that by the strength relative to durasteel of the armor material actually in use.
This would definitely need a code change. Probably the most convenient place in the code to do this would be when you buy or upgrade the ship, when reading the data from units.csv and writing it to serialized_xml. Instead of copying the cm figures straight, multiplying them by relative material strength on the fly.

OT:
Sorry for the delay with the turret models; still working on the Drayman :oops:
/OT
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Post by targ collective »

Relax Chuck! Any improvement is good improvement - be it a new Drayman model, new turrets, new firable missiles like my flak drones, whatever. It's all good. Just work on what you want to work on, so long as it makes the game better and you're contributing. No-one wants to tie you down or anything, just enjoy the modelling and create something beautiful, yes?

EDIT: Oh yes we do need the area. We need it (and the thickness) to calculate the values we need for the armours, unless every shot is piercing and in the same spot. For realistic damage modelling we need to in effect spread each shot over the entire side, because each shot hits the entire side, affecting the value as a whole. Greater precision would mean using all eight values.

EDIT: Tracked down the armour values. Pasted here.

Talon - 10 front, 9 rear, 8 sides. (The Redeemer uses the same values.)

Stiletto - front 9, rear 8, 7 sides.

Gladius - front 14, rear 10, 8 sides.

Broadsword - front 15, rear 15, 13 sides.

Paradigm - front 80, rear 50, 65 sides.

Tarsus - front 10, rear 10, 8 sides.

Demon - front 14, rear 12, 9 sides.

Orion - front 48, rear 50, 35 sides.

Galaxy - front 25, rear 20, 17.5 sides.

Centurion - front 20, rear sides 15.

Drayman - front 35, rear 30, 28 sides.

Dralthi - front 15, rear 13.5, 12 sides.

Gothri - front rear 17.5, 15 sides.

Salthi - front 3, rear 2, 1.5 sides (weaker than a Talon!) But surely the Retros would have given this a buff? Are these really the original Privateer values?

Kamekh - 70 front, 40 rear, 55 sides.

So do we use these values as canon, are these values what were used ingame? What's our mj/cm conversion rate? Will we need new values for our variants? Soon as I have those figures I can put this together.
Last edited by targ collective on Tue May 22, 2007 11:06 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Ehm.. Did you see the chart that Brad Mick posted in the other thread?
http://www.wcnews.com/articles/gunchart.htm
It's got Joules and "cm durasteel" penetration for most weapons in WC.
Let me see if I can find the armor materials strength factors...
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Post by targ collective »

Ah, thank you. I shall get to work forthwith. But I'll also need the resistance multipliers for the different armour upgrades.

EDIT: Which I presume were what you meant by armour strength factors. Maybe I should brush up on my comprehension skills...

EDIT: Once I strip the non-Privateer stuff I'm left with just eight of the approximately 15 weapons in Privateer, but that's okay - if the relative strengths of the weapons are the same I can use a simple conversion based on the one weapon. Best to double-check it to be sure they are in proportion. If not then I'll need the entire list to recreate the original Privateer damage model.
Last edited by targ collective on Mon May 21, 2007 3:38 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by targ collective »

Ahh, perfection. A complete, comprehensive list. I'll leave shields as they are for now, but in time they should also be ship specific.

I'll lose the salthi stats, as that does not yet seem to appear in game. Hardly surprising - the thing is so pathetic it's unbalanced.

EDIT: I presume using the real ingame icons is illegal?

EDIT: Simpler to model the systems seperately and bung them in different mods.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

targ collective wrote:Ahh, perfection. A complete, comprehensive list. I'll leave shields as they are for now, but in time they should also be ship specific.
Excellent!
I'll lose the salthi stats, as that does not yet seem to appear in game. Hardly surprising - the thing is so pathetic it's unbalanced.
Indeed they are...
EDIT: I presume using the real ingame icons is illegal?
No idea, but tell you what: I can model one in like 5 minutes and make renders.
EDIT: Simpler to model the systems seperately and bung them in different mods.
Not sure I follow...
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Post by targ collective »

Until we get Forbidden Upgrades functionality ship-specific will only work one way - up.

Go ahead and create us cool new Privateer-style icons. Having those ingame would certainly be a plus. 180x180 pixels please, transparent backgrounds.

The thread was about adding functionaliy for different ship stats all in one mod right? It would be simpler to fiddle with the figures and create three mods, all using one stat table with no overlap.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

What do you mean by "one mod", "three mods"... ?

Here's some armor pics, transparent background:

Plasteel 360Image

Plasteel 180Image

Plasteel 128Image

Tungsten 360Image

Tungsten 180Image

Tungsten 128Image

Isometal 360Image

Isometal 180Image

Isometal 128Image

Getting back to turrets... I'll do the meshes first, then unwrap them all.
Small tail turret:

Image

Small top/bottom turret:

Image

Medium size (corvette sized) single turret"

Image

Keep in mind that the scale is different for medium turrets; --8 meters diameter compared to 4 meters for small ones.
Dual version:

Image

Heavy turrets still to come...
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Post by targ collective »

All good stuff! Bear in mind that properly finished icons need a splash of colour though - those turrets are all untextured as yet.

They're all going to be 180x180pix, so you don't need to spend that long on it, but matt grey all the way through the upgrades screen? Great for working icons, but we will need those textures eventually.

A quirk in the very quirky engine is that it uses base 3 in weapon damage calcs and base five in armour resistance calcs - that is, 1 in weapon damage is 3mjs; 1 in armour resistance is 5mjs. I'm scaling weapon damages up by two thirds to compensate.

The weapon damage rates are out of scale to each other, as are reactor drains. If this was to correct imbalances in the original Privateer I applaud the efforts; however I am going to revert completely to the original Privateer damage model if possible, as once the new armours are ingame it will play like a comp.etely different animal. If you don't believe that, bear in mind that all armour upgrades replace your hull with 1 cm protection right now. Shocking, yes? And the Cent originally had approx. 20x that resistance; the Orion approx. 40x; the Paradigm even more.

My ship list is not yet complete - I need to get Sartha figures and such before I can start work on this properly. I'm on that now.

One last thing Chuck - can you give me the spawn rates for the different ships in the original Privateer?
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

The turrets pics are not for icons; only the armor pics are; I was just showing the progress. Indeed I will texture the turrets, but for that I have to UV-unwrap them, which is actually more work than the modelling.

Go ahead and fix all that stuff. It sounds to me like you're in the right track: In the original game, getting a few shots on the armor was no big deal, whereas in the remake, once the armor starts getting damage you're toast in a matter of seconds.
I think what we should start is a units_csv_history.txt file where changes to units.csv are documented. So that when people work hard calculating things to put in it, somebody doesn't come later, unaware of how firm or serious those figures are, and start tweaking them.

EDIT:
I've no idea about spawn rates. About a year ago, LOAF, of CIC fame, was working on documenting the exact number and kind of enemies encountered in every Privateer mission. I don't know if he finished that or not; and it wasn't about non-mission-specific, random spawns.
I can confirm that each system had different spawn rates, for sure: Playing the original Privateer (which I did like a dozen times) I only once encountered a randomly spawned Kilrathi ship in Troy, for example. So their spawn rate there was very low but not zero.

If you find the figures somewhere, there's an issue to consider with the VS engine: In the original game, if you encountered say 12 Demons, only 2 of them were actually shooting at you at any given time. The VS engine is able to do AI and physics for all ships involved, and so encounters with multiple enemies are a lot tougher, all other things being equal.
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Post by targ collective »

Double post! Postcount+1 :p
Last edited by targ collective on Tue May 22, 2007 1:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by targ collective »

So should damage resistances be scaled up by six times? Or should the player try not to get in that situation at all if possible?

These turrets you're doing... Once the work is complete, could you take the shots for the upgrades screen? If we're going to go rendered there, we might as well make a proper job of it.

I have more than enough to do with these armour figures. Research into spawn rates will either have to wait until that's done, or wait until someone who knows about these things contacts us here.

The Changes package already doubles as a change tracker.
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Post by targ collective »

My working list of resistances:

Salthi - front 3, back 2, 1.5 sides, total 8

Sartha - front back 4, 3 sides, total 14

Hornet - 4 all round, total 16

Sparrowhawk - front 5 back 4.5, 4 sides, total 17.5

Scimitar - front back 6, 5 sides, total 22

Fireblade - front back 7, 4.5 sides, total 24

Raptor - front back 8, 6 sides, total 28

Stiletto - front 9, back 8, 7 sides, total 31

Talon - front 10, back 9, 8 sides, total 35

Krant - front 9, back 10, 8 sides, total 35

Tarsus - front 10, back 10, 8 sides, total 36

Gladius - front 14, back 10, 8 sides, total 40

Demon - front 14, back 12, 9 sides, total 44

Dralthi - front 15, back 13.5, 12 sides, total 52.5

Sabre - front back 16, 11 sides, total 54

Broadsword - front back 15, 13 sides, total 56

Grikath - front back 16, 14 sides, total 60

Gothri - front back 17.5, 15 sides, total 65

Centurion - front 20, back sides 15, total 65

Galaxy - front 25, back 20, 17.5 sides, total 80

Orion - front 48, back 50, 35 sides, total 118

Drayman - front 35, back 30, 28 sides, total 121

Kamekh - front 70, back 40, 55 sides, total 220

Paradigm - front 80, back 50, 65 sides, total 260

Dilloh, is that right for the Fireblade and the Sparrowhawk? They're the new ships I couldn't find figures for.
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Post by Dilloh »

The Fireblade values are fine, it should be much lighter than the Demon.

The Sparrowhawk is some sort of TalonMK2, so it should have a better armor than the Talon, as it already had in earlier PU versions - I'd suggest to have an armor improvement of about 50-100% compared to the Talon.
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Post by targ collective »

All right. Once I've got this done this I'm going to pass maintenance of this over to you and the rest of the PU team - I'll include detailed instructions on how to do this. If you're adding any new ships in the next release I'll need the damage values now, and once I've got them I'd be grateful if you froze adding new ships until I have this working. Then just follow the documentation to add the new values - it just means shifting the values for armour up one in the .template entires and adding your new armours in unit.csv, I'm sure that won't give you any trouble once I've broken the back of things. No, wait - as I was typing this I just had a brainstorm and it came to me in a flash how I can make this truly ship-specific. I won't go into detail here except to say it will be even easier to maintain, if not implement, as implementation requires a dummy value for each ship armour. Better get to work!

I'll give the Sparrowhawk 15 front and back and 12 sides. EDIT: Too little. 15 front and back and 13 sides. /EDIT And now, at last, with a final and concrete stats list, I can move out of the research phase into the implementation phase.

Next version of the Changes package will require changes to every ship in the game, and two values for each ship's armour of each type - one a dummy value, the other a real value...
Last edited by targ collective on Wed May 23, 2007 11:20 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

targ collective wrote: These turrets you're doing... Once the work is complete, could you take the shots for the upgrades screen? If we're going to go rendered there, we might as well make a proper job of it.
Yeah, absolutely.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Dual heavy turret (16 m diameter):

Image

Triple heavy turret (19 m diameter):

Image

What I'm not too happy with is the cannons; they look more like conventional gun barrels than like plasma/particle things; I'll have to figure something out...
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