Vega Strike Forums

Haven't finished my cargo ship, but there's still too much work to do on it, so might as well keep working on it slowly, while working on WCU stuff...
So... Bengal...

EDIT:
I'm pretty low on pics... Got one pic of the Claw from the back... and then on deck briefings and stuff...

EDIT2:
No holes from the back... How did one park in a Bengal?, driving in from the front?

Yes, the Claw and Concordia only have holes in front. The Claw MAY have had extra bays on the sides, it did according to WCA -- someone at wcnews is doing a composite shot of the bengal.

Thanks for doing it, this way I can hold off redoing the flight model until this is ready our current Claw is a bit too cartoonish.

AI next...

Spirit, the gun placements in the TC are all spherical. Do you have them? Or do you want me to put spheres on it? If I put spheres, you could put a set of normal guns and they'd protrude out of the sphere and quite likely loog good even as they move around (a sphere being symetrical, you can't tell it's not rotating with the gun).

We can make spherical turrets, sure. What I'd like are untextured spheres that are a bit too small. Reason being, when I place the turret and they cover the sphere, I know they're good.

This said, I was hoping to standardize turret meshes across the board at some point... (one sort for fighters, one sort for confed capships and one sort for kilrathi capships), reason being turrets are used a lot so we have less stuff to keep in RAM. I'm going to do with a quasi-spherical design I guess, sorta like WC4.

This hasn't started too well. First I tried an incremental approach for the tower (background) which proved to laborious and infertile. Then I tried a new shape (foreground) but it seems that smoothing doesn't go with WC too much.



Looks like I'll have to start the tower again from scratch tonight.
I'm beginning to think there's only one way (for me) to do this: Fully detailed and realistic looking tower with doors and fixtures and whatnot. I just don't know how to make an abstract shape look good.

These are my reference pics, btw; if I'm missing any better ones pls let me know.



Not sure where the bottom one comes from, but it must be authoritative, as the schematic drawing favors at least some of its features, versus the middle picture, like the top hat of the control tower.

Hi Chuck,

dunno if you still check wcnews.... hehe

yet, there is this Lars guy who is doing amazing work on those vessels.

check out those threads:

http://www.crius.net/zone/showthread.php?t=19608

http://www.crius.net/zone/showthread.php?t=19496

hope they will help you...

That's a nice piece of work. Thanks for the links.

Perhaps you can get some inspiration from his tower:

chuck_starchaser wrote:That's a nice piece of work. Thanks for the links.

de nada

Halleck wrote:Perhaps you can get some inspiration from his tower...

Actually, the tower is why I said this was a "nice" piece of work; --if it had been just everything else I would have used a superlative or two. I find that tower unsatisfying: Just filling and adornments, nothing that he added fools my eyes into seeing any "purpose". Like the front surface... Basically, you take one of those old, ridiculous textures that show random bricks or tiles overlapping, and turn the lines into recesses in the geometry, and that's what it basically is.
I'm still trying to figure out what these tanks or silos contain. His theory that they might contain electronics makes no sense to me. Electronics take very little room.
For another thing, I've just decided that the "wings" will be anything but wings. What, I don't know yet. But wings would be just too damn stupid; not only from the point of view that they serve no purpose in vacuum, but also from the point of view that the rest of the ship doesn't look the least bit aerodynamic, so it would be even inconsistent to have wings. Maybe some kind of platforms, for holding radars or antennas... or maybe telescopes... YES! Telescopes; so that you could have a pair of goggles that get the image of a telescope on either side, and so, within a few miles, be able to visualize the battle theatre in 3D. Indeed; this would be a sane and worthy purpose.

Using occam's razor here, I'd think that the "wings" serve the purpose of acting as mounts for the engines and turrets (giving the turetts unprecedented range of motion and F.O.V.), while doubling as storage volume.

I was referring to the wings on the sides of the control tower. The big things back there, actually, it never occured to me to think of them as "wings", until now just trying to figure out what you were talking about . Actually, I'm still not sure if you refer to the things curving down, or the big blocks behind them. Any case, neither ones ever looked like wings to me. But the little ones on the sides of the control tower did, and in fact I was shaping them as wings in my model, and Lars obviously thought they were wings too. Those, I'm saying, will NOT be wings anymore, will be definitely squarish, and house a pair of stereo set of scopes and radars and all things sensorial. That will make sense

Still wondering what those crude oil tanks are doing there...

An then the other biggie: Figuring out the scale of the thing; like my ass is 700 meters, if it were, the windows would be so small you'd need an electron microscope to see them...

Just came up with an armor panelling technique... here's a test:

SHINEY!!!!

(how many polys will the claw be?)

Lots. The tower alone is 2k tris already and I've barely started on it yet. I'm not sure it's going to work out, even though this is the proverbial third try. But panelizing is just about the only way to add detail that our antagonists can't pick on, so there's a big temptation to just panelize like crazy

chuck_starchaser wrote:...panelizing is just about the only way to add detail that our antagonists can't pick on, so there's a big temptation to just panelize like crazy

Huh. I thought you were just complaining about how the other guy's model was panelized. Not that I have anything against panelling/greebling, but it seems a bit hypocritical...

eeep, who's the antagonists? the Pioneer kitties?

@Halleck:
I did not complain about the presence of armor panels; but at the pattern of them. Logical way to apply armor panels would be like a grid. If they overlap or form complex patterns it's just too plain obvious, to my eyes at least, that someone is trying too hard to add complexity. Look at the inner trimming on the vertical beams around the cylindrical tanks. Looks like Aztec embroidery to me.

@Spirit:
Why Pioneer? Who banned you, me, everyone else we know, and called the whole VS community "assholes", and WCU a "horrible project"?

My service provider has the disk full. No, I'm not at the limit of *my* quota, though getting close (81%); but the physical hard disk space at the server is maxed out. I imagine the maintainer will do something, but I'm just telling you because for now I can't upload any pics.

I see...

Chuck, perhaps in the meantime you can use a free image hosting service like imageshack.us, or upload them to the project web space on the sourceforge shell server (/home/groups/v/ve/vegastrike/htdocs/users/ and make directory chuck_starchaser) - or /home/groups/w/wc/wcuniverse/htdocs somewhere since the VS web space is already over quota.

Here was my take on the tanks and wings. Both of them are part of a sensor/communications array. The tanks are housing a very large side scanning sensor, (radar, hyperspace, whatever) the wings would be for the communications array. Granted this is all hypothetical BS but it makes more sense then "lets add widgets to make the ship look cool." Also where are you going with the armor plating? I do not recall any other ships having separate armor plates other then perhaps the Midway. If you are planning to add armor plates, then I foresee continuity issues, with other ships of the era.

Very true. My last idea about what the tanks might be was "water recycling". Not a very appealing thought, granted.
In the meantime, I tried a kind of abstract, non-committal greebling...



Pretty expensive, atm, tho, maybe I can redo it for less...

Or use my server I'm after all using yours.

Great mesh!

Re Pioneer... that's just LOAF being an asshat. I'm all for friendly competition though, so let's just wrap up a game that Pioneer can become a module of when they mess up with their engine

That's the spirit! I doubt that will happen, tho; Howard seems to have a good handle on game programming. But we should have walkable ships though. I probably thought of the idea first

No kidding either; like the first thing I thought the very first time I loaded up Privateer was "why can't we walk around inside ships and stations?"

My server seems okay now. Talking about Pioneer, I'd promised Brad I'd keep his training video in my server for all time, and I just ate my words and removed it... Oh well, it was 500 megs, tho; and we need the space. I gotta put a sign in the wiki, for people to PM me if they want to see it.

How's this concept for a bridge? Worth building upon?

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