Making Un-Unibody Ships

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KillerB
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Making Un-Unibody Ships

Post by KillerB »

All of the ships in Vega Strike, even the really big freighters & Capitol Warships, are built in one piece. How would one go about remodeling them so that they have multiple destroyable sections and targetable subsystems?

When attacking say a Gleaner, you bang away at the thing until the entire hull gives way. It would seem much more realistic if you could destroy say the engine room & bring the beast to a stop.

I used to mod ships in Freelancer, although it's been a while...seems I used a program called Milkshape for breaking up a large hull into sections, and another program...hardcmp?.....for placing 'hard points' for weapons/reactor/shield/scanner. What programs are used to develop the ships in Vega Strike?
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Re: Making Un-Unibody Ships

Post by TBeholder »

Secondary parts like those big cans on Yeoman can be cut away and turned into subunits with CARGO role - just like Skatecargo pod on Dodo. Heh, a Python script could shuffle these things randomly or profile as requested on spawning the ship. Same applies to bubbles on Shenzong, side-modules on Tridacna, radar on Mining Base and Relay (a script aiming these things can be added later) - and e.g. side-hangar branches of Fighter Barracks, except they need to be given docks/weapons and a proper Role in data. There's not a lot of these bases and capships, VS can afford running another handful of inert or near-inert subunits in the system.
As to ship parts like "wing" consoles and engines - support isn't implemented in the engine yet, though of course it's kind of stands on roadmap and is discussed.
Last edited by TBeholder on Wed Dec 04, 2013 3:18 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Making Un-Unibody Ships

Post by klauss »

Yes, currently, if you want them destructible, they have to be a sub-unit, with all the overhead that implies.

Eventually, we'll make units have support for multiple interconnected meshes (parts), and a system to simulate break-up by splitting the graph.

If you do not need them destructible, we can whip up multiple mesh support without much fuss.
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Re: Making Un-Unibody Ships

Post by KillerB »

klauss wrote:If you do not need them destructible, we can whip up multiple mesh support without much fuss.
Well thanks but making them destructible is actually the whole point :wink:

What programs do we use to build these meshes in the first place?
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Re: Making Un-Unibody Ships

Post by loki1950 »

What programs do we use to build these meshes in the first place?
Any 3D modelling app most were created with Blender one of the best Open Source projects around.After you have the ship at a finished state export it to .obj .mtl format run it though mesher(our own tool) to convert it to the format for our engine.There is a GUI for inserting units into the engine called unitconverter written in Python that is in the svn repo most of this is on the wiki BTW in more detail ;)

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Re: Making Un-Unibody Ships

Post by klauss »

Sadly, unitconverter is probably now broken, given the change to CSV tables we applied just recently.

Maybe we should fix it. I think we had the code somewhere.
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Re: Making Un-Unibody Ships

Post by loki1950 »

The code is here klauss http://sourceforge.net/p/vegastrike/cod ... Converter/

I imagine that using the same class and methods as the engine should do the trick.

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Re: Making Un-Unibody Ships

Post by klauss »

No, it's harder than that. It has to maintain the split, and write the proper columns, the proper rows, to the proper files. Not a cakewalk.

But it's good to know it's possible :)
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Re: Making Un-Unibody Ships

Post by KillerB »

Hmmm......thanks for the prompt although rather disappointing replies guys. Please lemme know if and when we get a functional unitconverter going again...I'm looking forward to tearing those big unibody ships apart (code-wise & then in-game XD)
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Re: Making Un-Unibody Ships

Post by loki1950 »

Yeah there is lot of work involved :shock: but most of those meshes should break down readily been getting my Blender skills sharpened lately trying to get a handle on animation using Blender and MakeHuman so when we do get that working unitconverter I should be ready for the task :)

Enjoy the Choice :)
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