More ship customisability

Erk · Post by **Erk** » Thu Dec 20, 2007 1:46 am

Before people complain, I'm not talking about the frequently proposed request of explaining why a particular upgrade is unavailable (although that would be great).

I'm talking about more detailed info on installed systems on a stock ship, and the ability to change more of those stock systems.

For example, if I buy a Plowshare, clearly it has some kind of installed engine. What type of engine is that? Can I strip it out and replace it with something else? If not, why not? There are several systems just "integrated with the hull" in VS that could/should be made upgradable or customisable.

Ideally I'd like to see something where nearly every aspect of the ship from spec drive and engines to internal gyros and heat sinks could be customised and swapped out. Balancing systems could become a lot of fun (particularly if decimal values for item volume were used instead of everything being 1/2/3/4 cubic meters, so that designers could optimise system size to get the perfect build).

Finally, as part of this, it would be cool to be able to "tweak" existing systems, altering one aspect of a part to improve function in other ways... for example, decreasing shield capacity to improve regeneration, possibly through having more minor components with no weight/volume.[/url]

Post by **loki1950** » Thu Dec 20, 2007 1:57 am

Sounds good but the current upgrade code would need a complete redesign and rewrite that is on the road map for other reasons but it will likely be a while till it's started there are other priorities as well

Enjoy the Choice

ollobrains · Post by **ollobrains** » Thu Dec 20, 2007 10:10 am

erk unless u can find someone that might be interested in assisting to program these suggestions

dust · Post by **dust** » Fri Dec 21, 2007 8:37 pm

http://www.caelinux.com/

i know its a long way, but will make vega strike much more realistic. no need for doing it as exact for now, more to calculate a model and to put the data in a table for quick lookup. will bring the people to construct spaceships and the quicker the pc are the more detailed the models can be and calculated in detail.

not only upgrade ships but construct it, that would be intereseting for a lot of people.

Post by **loki1950** » Fri Dec 21, 2007 9:40 pm

That would sure attract uber geeks

CAD is a bit over the top and with most OSS Cad packages are not good at texture manipulation as the projected outcome is an object not an image which blender does well if you grock the interface

there is even a new project at blender.org to make blender more friendly for game production.

Enjoy the Choice

GoldenGnu · Post by **GoldenGnu** » Sat Dec 22, 2007 5:09 pm

The idea of more customization is great...

+1

Psyco Diver 69 · Post by **Psyco Diver 69** » Sun Dec 23, 2007 8:39 am

I personally would be more interested in the ability to change a ships color. Maybe add writing to the side or graphics. That way you truely make your ship personal and when you whoop someones butt online they cause say in the forum "I just got killed by some guy by a white and black ship with a cow on the side" ( I watch to many dell commercials). Use credits to pay for it and make it cheap for primary colors and more expensive for "elobrate" colors, 2 tones, graphics, ect.

Erk · Post by **Erk** » Thu Dec 27, 2007 12:20 am

Yeah, it would be very cool if we could have certain colours on textures for ships that could be redone... like Team Colouring in games like Wesnoth. It only requires texture artists to make sure they have areas of, say, Hue 0 and Hue 125 on their model; then we allow users to recolour Hue 0 to any HSV to be their character-specific Primary Colour, and Hue 125 to be their specific Secondary Colour. It would be really fun for multiplayer and even single.

and yeah, it would be nice to add decals to ships, either by having a single specified logo that appears on all your character's ships, or by making them user-specifiable. I think the first would be easier and generally better, then all of a specific players' ships would have the same emblem.

()Alf · Post by **()Alf** » Sun Dec 30, 2007 8:40 pm

I'm talking about more detailed info [...]

Seems i found a thread to use for my questions

The inventors of some stuff should have added some intentions/(ingame)descriptions for them, makes shopping much more interesting

.

1. What is the weapon 'PlasmaPlume' good for?
1.1. "special" Damage doesn't tell me anything

2. Why does the weapon 'Ion Burster' have 4 times energyusage of a Laser, which fits quite good related to other specs i think, but is in need of bullets (it's called a Bolt weapon ingame btw). Hopefully i will find ammo for that somewhere, which let me think that a replicator may be interesting, with high energy usage it could replicate slow but steady the bullets for your "ball" guns, maybe as upgrade for the weapon itself. No time for running out of bullets again.

2. seems to be answered, but 1. still doesn't make sense

http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... hp?t=10165

Post by **loki1950** » Sun Dec 30, 2007 11:57 pm

@()Alf so you have encountered one of the Minister of Information explanations they can be very dense

and sometimes confusing.

Enjoy the Choice

Turbo · Post by **Turbo** » Fri Jan 04, 2008 12:34 pm

Psyco Diver 69 wrote:I personally would be more interested in the ability to change a ships color.

It's not difficult if you have a paint program and some patience. Look here:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... php?t=8722
and follow the link to download the file, which includes instructions that will give you enough info to make your own. This particular file was for a PU centurion, but the principles work for any ship.

With this implementation, the custom paint job llves the Units folder on your hard disk. So a multiplayer opponent would not see your custom paint job, unless you both exchanged your custom ship files beforehand, which would not be difficult.

Edit: My new paint job is done (see my new avatar?). It turns out that while all in-game textures are DDS, the game will understand PNG and JPG. It just loads them slower, which doesn't matter when my ship is the only Lancelot with this paint job.

Turbo

Moe479 · Post by **Moe479** » Sun Jan 13, 2008 3:52 pm

the biggest problem i see on this topic is artwork still done for the game, if the engines of the ships should be customizeable and not only upgradeable, that means they are compleatly exangeble the hull of the ship have to be ready for this to make look good!

we need to model ships without engines and set hardpoints to mount them, and we need extra models for the engines, for evry ship!

than wee need engine-classes and to specifiy which hardpoint can hold which classes of engines, cause fighterhull wopuld hardly able to opperate a capitalengine.

of cause interchangeable engines, in the way u realy see them, would make not all ships of the same type look the same, and bring alot more varity in the game, same could be done with practical evry part of the ship, but its an assload of work!

Erk · Post by **Erk** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 3:28 am

Realistically, the artwork does not have to change. That is, IMO, too huge a request. A new engine would just mean new ship performance in flight.

Besides, who says it would look different externally? If I strip the engine from a car and replace it with a fancy tuned up hot rod engine, the car's outward appearance needn't change.

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 9:00 pm

I agree with Erk that some level of engine customisability within the current upgrade system, much like the multi speed and multi turn enhancers in 043, which are absent in the current svn.

dust · Post by **dust** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 9:54 pm

while im engaged in http://csp.sourceforge.net/ which use http://www.openscenegraph.org/ (flightgear is using it too) i found this reading http://www.realityprime.com/articles/sc ... e#tomorrow

maybe its better not to compare with the engine, more like exhaust or wheels. maybe in a way like a jet has some rockets attached. you have the core ship where you can attach equipment like engine, weapons and so.

Shark · Post by **Shark** » Fri Jan 25, 2008 7:54 am

Just a note about custom colors/textures: in Homeworld 2 you could specify a unique color scheme for your fleet, as well as a special "badge" texture that would be mounted in particular places (different for each model). So, it should be possible to support this in VS.

Turbo · Post by **Turbo** » Sun Feb 03, 2008 9:19 am

VS appears to support logos, including a "logos" folder among the textures and a place for logo data in the model file headers. But the art style guides in the Wiki, which are theoretically intended for model & texture artists to use for reference, are mostly empty. It's a big project and they need people to keep the Wiki up to date.

Of course, that is easy for me to say -- I'm committed to another project for now.

Turbo

Post by **ace123** » Sun Feb 03, 2008 11:51 am

Yes, VS used to use this.

Here's how to specify this in the XMesh:

Code: Select all

<Logo type="5" rotate="0.000000" size="1.399999" offset="0.010000">
	<Ref point="393" weight="1.000000" />
	<Ref point="395" weight="1.000000" />
	<Ref point="396" weight="1.000000" />
	<Ref point="391" weight="1.000000" />
</Logo>

So you have to know the 4 points that surround the logo. But you can define your own 4 custom points to put the logo on after the fact. (Still it's kind of nasty especially in high-poly meshes).

So basically the process would be to use mesher to convert to xmesh, add the logo, and mesher it back to bfxm.

Not sure why that logo number is 5... The code only defines the values 0 (faction-wide) and 1 (squad-specific, but defaults to a secondary logo).

Will take me more hunting to figure out exactly how this all works.

Also the factions.xml has:

Code: Select all

<Faction name="aera" logoRGB="logos/aeraPri.png" secLogoRGB="logos/aeraSec.png" ...