Halleck and Nózmájner's Elite Mod!

[Halleck]

I was bored, and I was talking with a guy called Arne about elite. Won't you know it, but I got the idea to make a little elite mod for fun.

This won't be a project or anything of that nature, I'm just gonna add some elite ships into the game (probably will base it off privateer remake). It will probably be graphics-only, I don't have the patience to redo all the stats, or the skills to change the interface.

However, if YOU would like to do these things, you are more than welcome!

I started by adding the cobra mk III to an old copy of vegastrike.



Feedback is appreciated!

[Halleck]

New color scheme!

[Nózmájner]

I've got a bit detailed model (it has undercarrige and visible retro thrusters) of the Eagle (probaply the MKII, but I can't recall. The one with two large pods on the wings)
It needs a lot of cleanup, because I boxmodelled it in Worldcraft a while ago, and it has no textures.

I made that for a refference to a drawing I planned, but then I didn't made it (I'm planning to revive the idea of that drawing with the Llama by the way).

I could clean it up and send it to you. Interested?

[Halleck]

Sure! that would be cool, please send it to:
fadookie at gmail dot com

I was going to base most of my stuff off the BBC Elite dataset found here:
http://www.neilwallis.com/elitejava/shipyard.htm

But I don't have any good references for colorization since all I have is Elite 1 for the NES. Maybe I can get an amiga emulator or something...

[Nózmájner]

OK! I do it. Hopefully I would be able to do it today.
There is a version wich is downloadable for free, with some bugfixes. It is at http://sharoma.com/frontierverse Look for the Frontierverse version.
It works with dosbox.

[Halleck]

Cool!

Thanks for the link, I'll check it out.

[MamiyaOtaru]

There are a couple config file options for making the HUD more elite like. At least I think that is what Elite was like. Check out these lines in vegastrike.config
<var name="drawLineToTarget" value="false" />
<var name="drawLineToTargetsTarget" value="false" />
<var name="drawLineToITTS" value="false" />
<var name="drawAllTargetBoxes" value="false" />

Some or all of those set to true might make things a little closer to Elite.

[Nózmájner]

Also if I can find my drawing about it, I can model an Asp explorer to you too. And also the Puma Clipper, and maybe the Imperial Courier/Trader.

I made these plans about them, because I wanted to model them from paper. At the end I only made two of them: the Cobra MKIII and the Puma Clipper.

[Nózmájner]

I finally completed it. Altough I removed the landing gear from it.
And I checked it in the game. It is called Eagle Long Range Fighter. It is the starting ship if you start out from Ross 154



I also made the other two versions, because the only difference is the pod on the wings.

[Halleck]

Looks great! Thanks a lot for this.

The best format for me is probably .obj+.mtl but I can also use .lwo and a couple others.
I use wings3d for texturing and for orienting the mesh along the z+ axis, so if you can even get blender to export to .wings it would be the easiest.

When I used blender to export the .blend file to .obj+.mtl and imported it into wings, there were several overlapping objects that seemed to be duplicates of each other- i deleted most of them (including the landing gear). Wierd.

[Nózmájner]

Those overlaping faces and such is because I moved some old (and heavily boxmodelled)parts of that ship onto another layer, instead of deleting them. (lazyness, but let's just say I kept them for future reference for me ) I tried to export it to .obj from Blender, and it merged all objects on all layers. That's why there are overlaping faces. Try to delete everything but the craft before exporting from Blender. (the crafts three version is on the first 3 layer.)

Also I was unable to export it to wings.

[Halleck]

After pulling my hair out, tweaking geometry, cursing the gods, mapping and re-mapping uv coordinates, and pulling more hair out, I bring you these screenshots:


The Eagle Has Landed!


There's something wrong with the polygons on the port wing, and I can't figure out what. Thankfully, the work I put into cleaning up the geometry on the starboard wing seems to have paid off. Also, note the shiny cockpit.

[Nózmájner]

Yeah, that was a messy modell for sure . My appologies.
Anyway, if you successfully cleaned up the starboard side, why didn't you just copied it and mirrored on the lenght axis of the ship?

I hope the other ones are clean enough.

Edit:
I checked the modell, and there on the back of the wing (both top and bottom) is a vertex which is just not needed there:

I think that's why it looks odd. Hopefully if you merge that with a vertex on the same edge, it solves the problem. Again, my appologies.

[Halleck]

I see what you mean. The geometry on that wing is all f#&*'d up.
Anyway, I cut those vertices out and re-formed the faces by hand. I'm rather pleased with the results (fresh textures/texturemaps on this one as well):


Lookin' good, and very clean.

BTW, what should we call our mod? In keeping with the tradition of names based off "vega strike", maybe we can call it "elite strike" or something.

[Nózmájner]

Hmmm. I'm working on a mod?
BTW in this case I will happily modell some other ships too. Because pratrice is good. Anyway, How about that I make those others I sent you a bit more detailed, based on the original textures if avaible?

Name? How about VEgalite, or SEVMoV (Simple Elite Vessels Modification fOr Vegastrike), or Vintage Strike of Elite?

[klauss]

Vegalite sounds nice.

I've been trying Frontier Elite, and that game rocks!

However, if you ever want to do more than just new ships, you'll get in trouble. Lots of missing features
Yes, that old game has more features than VS does. To name a few worth mentioning:

* Deadlines
* Mission variety (missing person, for instance)
* Crewmen
* Laws (like firing in populated zones)

I think those ought to be in VS, they're just too good to miss them.

[smbarbour]

I might be mistaken, but I think there is a time limit (albeit rather loose) for cargo missions. I know that if you take too long to run the mission, you will fail it. (While running the Jenek campaign, I sat at Atlantis for too long before heading to Serenity and he was po'ed.)

[klauss]

Deadlines: If they are there, they're so loose that they don't show. In that case, they should be tightened a little, and made part of the mission description.

[Halleck]

Hmmm. I'm working on a mod?
BTW in this case I will happily modell some other ships too. Because pratrice is good. Anyway, How about that I make those others I sent you a bit more detailed, based on the original textures if avaible?

Name? How about VEgalite, or SEVMoV (Simple Elite Vessels Modification fOr Vegastrike), or Vintage Strike of Elite?

Heh, I consider you a de facto team member. We can make this more official sounding if you like.. how about "Art Director" or "Lead Artist"? Sounds important to me.
I guess I'll just be the Project Director.

As to the name... i kinda like "Vintage Strike". Not too keen on "vegalite" since it sounds like "vega-lite" or "vega-light". Right now my preference is probably "Elite Strike", since it gets the point across. More suggestions are welcome. Maybe "Elite Universe" or something?

Klauss: nothing is planned for now beyond modding all the ships, shuffling some mount points around, restricting weapon types, and changing vegastrike.config (for instance, I bound the left and right arrows to roll left/right instead of yaw left/right for elite-style flight. Also, I made some of the changes mamiyaotaru suggested.)
However, as I said in the first post, if any of you would like to see this project go beyond a graphical mod, you are more than welcome to contribute as you see fit.

[Nózmájner]

Yupp, Elite Strike is the most clear name.

Anyway, if you take this mod seriously, than I remodell the ships much more detailed, but somebody else has to do the textures, because I have not much experience in that.

Also, yesterday I modelled the Krait Assault craft and the Lion Transport too.
And I've got screenshots about some more ships.

Klauss: And a different FTL travel is needed too. I mean, in Frontier, you could jump from anywhere in a system, to any system in range, and you arrived to the outskirts of the system. Can this be made in Vegastrike?

Luckily in Frontier, there is a realistic star map, so we just need a correct star catalog for the universe, like Gliese Near Star Catalog or something.
There is a lot of material about things like this on Winchell Chung's page

Heh, I consider you a de facto team member. We can make this more official sounding if you like.. how about "Art Director" or "Lead Artist"? Sounds important to me. Wink

Well...if I need a title, how about "You know! That guy who helps."?

[klauss]

About the jump thing, it's possible in VS. Only there's no equipment that can do that. Perhaps there is a way to add a "Hyperspace Drive" that doesn't require a jump point to jump, but I imagine it will need some code hacking, I think the code checks whether you're in a jump point or not. But the engine is quite capable of teleporting you anywhere. From python, for instance, it's just a function call away.

About the rest, I'm already determined to keep bugging people to implement most features I can't do myself. I think VS itself would benefit greatly from those.

I figured out the problem with deadlines, thinking it through: time. VS Doesn't show the current date and time anywhere. VS universe is timeless, sort of speak. The only hint of time is the number that appears next to comm lines, but those get reset when you restart, so it works nothing like a date.

So, there should be a clock, to keep track of date and time, and jumping should take time. (A week for Elite Strike).

If I can manage to do that (add the clock, and a clock gauge in the cockpit), that will be a step closer to Elite, and two steps closer to deadlines.

[Halleck]

Anyway, if you take this mod seriously, than I remodell the ships much more detailed, but somebody else has to do the textures, because I have not much experience in that.

Don't worry too much about detail. This is elite after all, the epitome of stylish low-poly ships. I don't think anything higher-poly than the eagle model is needed. As I recall, all the elite 1 ships were in the 10-20 polygon range.

Also, I can generate textures as long as you assign materials. All we really need are solid color blocks anyway, as per the classic elites. Anything more complex than the third cobra screenshot I posted is probably overkill.

This brings up an interesting point, though. Should we decide on a definite visual reference for our project, or just make the graphics as we see fit? I think that it might be good to lean towards the style of Frontier, since the colors are nice and rich.

However, it's probably easier to emulate the flight physics of elite 1.

[dandandaman]

klauss, there *is* a time keeping mechanism ... the time is stored in the save game somewhere. Check out the footer for (dynamic) news articles to see it in action

Dan.a

[Halleck]

Btw, I found a good reference page with ALL the elite ship models.
http://www.hooplah.com/encounters/ident.htm

My initial goal was to get all the ships from elite 1 in using the bbc dataset, but now that Nózmájner is modelling other ones, I will take what comes to me.

[Halleck]

Just a little update, I've moved over my base of operations to a fresh installation of Privateer Remake 1.0. I am currently experimenting with music, and I've got most of the launch, flight, battle, and victory music replaced with midis from elite.

I'm also working on generating some rudimentary textures for Nóz's adder, asp, and puma clipper models.

EDIT: And made a splash screen. It's kind of a placeholder.

I can do better, honest. But this will do for now.