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Ingame screenshots

Posted: Mon Sep 24, 2007 12:53 am
by Beowulf
First screenshots of models ingame, will post more in the next days...
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Posted: Mon Sep 24, 2007 1:03 am
by loki1950
Now to make up some stats everything :wink: Looking good Beowulf

Enjoy the Choice :)

Posted: Mon Sep 24, 2007 9:36 am
by hellcatv
you should use the new bumpmapping capability to make nice normalmaps for your tie fighters---that would make the solar panels look all rigidy without wasting any performance

Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 12:22 am
by Beowulf
Newest addition:
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Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2007 6:19 pm
by Beowulf
The K-Wing heavy bomber:
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Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2007 10:36 pm
by Beowulf
Here's a special one for hellcatv:
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Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2007 11:43 pm
by charlieg
Great stuff Beowulf. Are you putting these in SVN somewhere?

Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2007 11:48 pm
by Beowulf
I will in the next few days. Let me clean up a few things first :)

Posted: Fri Sep 28, 2007 12:25 pm
by hellcatv
yay a Z-95... don't remember it having 3 blasters except in the specs... I guess the low poly rendering of tie fighter wasn't up to the challenge

Posted: Fri Sep 28, 2007 2:42 pm
by Beowulf
The first version on the market had three blasters. I assume that these weren't nearly as strong as lasers around the time of the battle of yavin since the Z-95's design is over a hundred years old. Later versions were equipped with the two lasers you see in most depictions. I don't think that the TIE Fighter engine was the reason behind this since it was capable of rendering the X-Wing (which has four lasers which isn't that far away from six blasters).

Posted: Fri Sep 28, 2007 6:05 pm
by Moe479
wasnt the canopy of the headhunter more bubblelike? u may also need to fix the smothing on most models, the avenger is the only one i would count as okay, even if the model/texture could be more detailed and the proportions r not in line with your(?) tie-bomber

Posted: Fri Sep 28, 2007 9:20 pm
by Beowulf
Moe479 wrote:wasnt the canopy of the headhunter more bubblelike?
I agree, the canopy is wrong. It's different on the headhunter I made but that one isn't textured and it might need some more detail.
u may also need to fix the smothing on most models, the avenger is the only one i would count as okay, even if the model/texture could be more detailed and the proportions r not in line with your(?) tie-bomber
I'm neither a modeler nor a texturerer :-(
Are you good at these things? I'll make the mod (at least what I've done so far) available via subversion or some other means in the next few days---maybe you want to join the team? :)

Posted: Sat Sep 29, 2007 10:54 am
by chuck_starchaser
Good stuff! As it's been said, though; there's smoothing artifacts. Specially the first model, there's a lot of "false shadows" across faces. Check the WIKI How-To's, starting with "Understanding Smooth Groups".
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/HowTos#Modeling
If you're using Blender, those wikis are outdated. To split smooth groups in Blender now, you go to object mode, select an object, add attribute Edge Split, and change its setting from "From Angle" to "From Marked Sharp". Then go to edit mode, highlight all, W->Set Smooth; then in edge selection mode you highlight edges that should be sharp and go Ctrl-E->Mark Sharp.
Cheers.

Posted: Sat Sep 29, 2007 11:05 pm
by Beowulf
The Nebulon B2 Frigate---the big turrets are too large, will change that later:
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Strangely if this ship is flown by the AI it doesn't use any turrets---what do I have to do to make the AI use them?

Posted: Sun Sep 30, 2007 12:00 pm
by Beowulf
The BFF-1 Bulk Freighter:
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Posted: Sun Sep 30, 2007 6:33 pm
by Beowulf
The XQ-5 platform:
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With this platform I lots of 'NetForce transform skrewed' on the console. Any idea what that means and where I might have made a mistake?

Posted: Sun Sep 30, 2007 6:46 pm
by chuck_starchaser
Beowulf wrote: With this platform I lots of 'NetForce transform skrewed' on the console.
Any idea what that means and where I might have made a mistake?
I've no idea what your sentence means, myself. What "platform" are you talking about?
I mentioned shading artifacts, and pointed you to the smoothing groups how-to.
Shading artifacts can result also from blotched meshes. Every edge in a mesh should be shared by at most 2 facets.
If you have edges shared by 3 facets, like a T, that is, some edge on the
surface of the hull has an additional polygon attached to it inside the ship,
you'll get shading artifacts on the surface, emanating from that edge.
What modelling software are you using?

Posted: Sun Sep 30, 2007 7:01 pm
by Beowulf
chuck_starchaser wrote:
Beowulf wrote: With this platform I lots of 'NetForce transform skrewed' on the console.
Any idea what that means and where I might have made a mistake?
I've no idea what your sentence means, myself. What "platform" are you talking about?
I mentioned shading artifacts, and pointed you to the smoothing groups how-to.
Shading artifacts can result also from blotched meshes. Every edge in a mesh should be shared by at most 2 facets.
If you have edges shared by 3 facets, like a T, that is, some edge on the
surface of the hull has an additional polygon attached to it inside the ship,
you'll get shading artifacts on the surface, emanating from that edge.
What modelling software are you using?
I was talking about this space installation :) I've found the error, the script I wrote for blender to generate turret vectors produced a few NaNs.
About the shading artifacts: I'll look at this later, at the moment I'm all busy learning how to get ships into the game and how to arm them etc...
Thanks for the help :)

Posted: Sun Sep 30, 2007 7:59 pm
by chuck_starchaser
Ah, you're using Blender; excellent!
To find snafus in the mesh, there's a very easy way. In edit mode, make
sure nothing is highlighted, go to edge selection mode, then from the Select
menu, click on "Non-Manifold".
Non-manifold edges are defined as edges shared by any number of polygons
other than 2. Thus, the borders of non-closed meshes will all be highlighted.
But except for such borders, nothing else should be highlighted. Press Z to go
to transparent mode, and spend a good 15 minutes looking over the mesh. If
you see any edges highlighted other than borders, it means one of two hings:
1) The edge is split (duplicate vertices at one or both ends) or...
2) There's more than two polygons sharing it (i.e.: an internal, invisible
polygon is attache to that edge and to some other edge or vertex elsewhere.

Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2007 7:59 pm
by Beowulf
The Lambda-class Shuttle, military version with a turret at the rear:
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Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2007 9:47 pm
by hellcatv
any chance you can make the wings open and closed?
you need to export one model per wing position (sucks, I know) then I can help you string it together into one ueber shuttle...and you can toggle it with a key :-)

Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2007 10:07 pm
by Beowulf
Maybe blender can generate these models automatically? I'll take a look at it...
A much more elegant way of doing this in my opinion would be to use subunits and have vegastrike turn these subunits on keystroke, but I guess that isn't possible?

Posted: Thu Oct 04, 2007 4:58 am
by hellcatv
I think it might be possible...there's the accessory thing--there might be a way to turn on and off the accessories ... or we could add a way maybe

the animation thing definitely works right now

Posted: Thu Oct 04, 2007 6:02 am
by jackS
Beowulf wrote: Strangely if this ship is flown by the AI it doesn't use any turrets---what do I have to do to make the AI use them?
A possible explanation -
Turrets (like all units) have a COMBAT ROLE field. The turret will prioritize engaging targets based upon its combat role and that of potential targets. If the turret is set as, for instance, an anti-capital turret, it will probably ignore fighters unless there's nothing else in range to target, and even then may take a while to come to the conclusion that there's nothing better to shoot unless said fighter is harrassing the ship.

The prioritization is fortunately not hardcoded, and can be changed by updating the table in ai/VegaPriorities.csv (so you can easily make everything shoot anything at everything -- although I wouldn't entirely recommend that :) )

What is the combat role of the turrets you positioned on the ship, and what was the combat role of the vessel you hoped they'd be firing at? Also, try giving some warmup time to capital engagements -- it can take a little while for the AIs to make up their minds as to what they're going to engage if neither of the ships is currently at a high simulation frequency.

Posted: Fri Oct 05, 2007 10:33 am
by Moe479
a s-foil toggle would be also great for x and b wing, the actis interceptor, ... etc.