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Very old idea Bussard Ramjet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjetThis is a bit OT, but, in all the Forstchen novels there are the "scoops"...
What's the scoop?
Pseudoscience crap,
Enjoy the Choice
Very old idea Bussard Ramjet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjetThis is a bit OT, but, in all the Forstchen novels there are the "scoops"...
What's the scoop?
Pseudoscience crap,
This is a good idea too; in that it limits the the performance impact by having most ships of that class have the guns built into the mesh, but for the player's own ship.If you like the modelled gun but still want gun purchases to make a visual difference, you can do what PR does with the stiletto. Military and player owned are different models. The military ship that one encounters in the game has its guns modelled on, while if a player should ever get ahold of one, it uses a model with no guns modelled on (so it can show whatever guns he might choose to mount).
Yeah no prob... since the gun typo cannot be changed game-wise, you can also put it in as a hard piece of the ship mesh. The rest means just adding values.what we could do is model this gun separately and make it a new gun in units.csv; but if it cannot be changed, it's better to leave it into the mesh, as making it a subobject incurrs a hefty overhead graphics-wise.
Maybe you could make this the main advantage of military guns. They are melted with the hull, if you want to take them out you need to destroy the whole ship. I mean they are fully armored and need to be disabled via the internal systems. Whereas customizable gun mounts are more receptive to damage: They are being feeded external, not armored.On the other hand, making it a subobject would make it targetable and destructible, which are good things...
Like ships have damage textures, this must be possible for subobjects. All you'd need to do is "break away" a piece and leave some rusty pieces of metal there, maybe with a transparent background to show something is missing. You could give subobjects to AI ships too, just make sure the computer cannot target them on fighters, or make this possible for the most advanced radar only.Then again, if you get into a really rough fight and lose one of your guns, it would be nice to see the loss reflected in what you see outside the cockpit. Maybe the solution is what MO was suggesting: Having one mesh for the player's ship and another mesh for all other ships of that model. The player's ship uses sub-units; the others are a single object.
You mean visually? Like on an airplane? Doesn't quite fit the launcher concept where you have tubes for that. On the other hand, it fits with the Priv intro where Talons fire the missiles mounted on the wing ends. Canonical error?What about missiles? They should be subobjects too, so they disappear as you spend them.
This is already possible FYIAnd while we're at it, we could add the ability to specify different textures to the different LOD's.
This is obviously harder, since as you know LOD is controlled at the mesh level, not at the level of the whole unit (which can be made of several meshes). You could approximate this by having the guns' LOD be empty, while the ship's LOD includes some crude guns. Then you'd have to make sure the ship's LOD displayed before the guns' or else there'd be a short period where there were no guns to be seen.chuck_starchaser wrote:Actually, the best solution would be, --but this would take a big hack on the engine-- to be able to specify a mesh using subunits for the top LOD, and a mesh with weapons and missiles built in for the second and lower LOD's.
Now you're really talking, this is music to my ears.I was totally opposed to the milspec crap that was put into the mod, with "milspec" ships that were the same as regular ships but couldn't be upgraded. Why? Because there should be something to gain in exchange for the loss of upgradability. Those "milspec" ships didn't look milspec, didn't feel milspec, and they weren't milspec. But I'll take the loss of upgradeability any day, if you give me a REAL military craft, with real shields and real armor, and big MF guns that can take out 3 talons of one shot.
There is no default key for the Shelton Slide.So, whatever key we use for Shelton, I forget, could be used to toggle the scoops
Well whatever you're doing, keep doing it, ITS BEAUTIFUL!!!Next is the back end; which is a mess right now; don't know what I'm doing there.
That's great news! Means we can use the lower LOD normal maps to bake higher LOD details. Probably, though, it doesn't cure the problem of having large, unused textures for distant ships occupying space in video ram, as probably all LOD's are loaded at once in video ram, which in turn force all the textures in; correct?MamiyaOtaru wrote:This is already possible FYIAnd while we're at it, we could add the ability to specify different textures to the different LOD's.
Right. Gottcha. There's an even greater reason keep things simple: If missiles had null second LOD's, they'd disappear in flight; so we'd have to treat guns and missiles differently, which doesn't sound too elegant to me.This is obviously harder, since as you know LOD is controlled at the mesh level, not at the level of the whole unit (which can be made of several meshes). You could approximate this by having the guns' LOD be empty, while the ship's LOD includes some crude guns. Then you'd have to make sure the ship's LOD displayed before the guns' or else there'd be a short period where there were no guns to be seen.chuck_starchaser wrote:Actually, the best solution would be, --but this would take a big hack on the engine-- to be able to specify a mesh using subunits for the top LOD, and a mesh with weapons and missiles built in for the second and lower LOD's.
Of course, the gun subunits would still be there (there'd just be nothing to draw), so it's pretty pointless. Might as well have the 4 polys or whatever for the gun LOD be attached to the gun mesh instead of the ship's.
Yeah, I'm leaning more towards having subunits; the only problem being that then there'd be a horrific number of subunits around: in a scene with 50 ships having on average 4 guns and four missiles, the unit count would skyrocket to 450. So, I think the only solution for now is to have player buyable ships use subunits, and NPC versions of ships having guns and missiles in the mesh. But this doubles the amount of mesher work to do and complicates maintenance.This also would cause problems if you wanted to have destructible guns. Best IMHO to just deal with things as are and either have guns built in at all LOD levels, or as separate objects at all LOD levels (assuming you are modelling the guns in instead of using the standard gun meshes). But you can at least use lower res textures at those lower LOD levels
You got that right. Chuck are you planning on "fixing up" anymore ships?.....say the Raptor?z30 wrote:This is shaping up to be the best looking fighter in PU.