faction, size and price of a vessel / upgrade volume oddity

[kraehe]

Moin Guru's,

I'm currently thinking about a vessel, nearly ready, as I made it for FlightGear before. But I need to reduce polycount a bit, as its currently 1404 polys, and also create a real low poly version for LOD. This boat has the flying wing shape of an Horten 229, so my vision about it would be a medium orbital fighter, without any cargo hold. I'm thinking about two medium weapon mounts, e.g. for razor, and two medium/large/special missile mounts loading either one torpedo or eigth friends or foe missiles each. The Horten should pull about 16g when equipped with decend shields, capacitator, jump drive, etc.

The first question would be: Is there any faction in need of such a vessel, or what faction would fit that style?

The other question is of course about price and size. Is there any formular to calculate price and size for vessels?

The last thing, me wonders about when browsing the vessels, are some with extreeme upgrade volume. Can someone explain to me, for w-hat does a Pacifier need 2.500sqm or a Goddard even 25.000sqm of upgrade volume?

ciao,Kraehe

[chuck_starchaser]

I'm currently thinking about a vessel, nearly ready, as I made it for FlightGear before. But I need to reduce polycount a bit, as its currently 1404 polys, and also create a real low poly version for LOD. This boat has the flying wing shape of an Horten 229, so my vision about it would be a medium orbital fighter, without any cargo hold. I'm thinking about two medium weapon mounts, e.g. for razor, and two medium/large/special missile mounts loading either one torpedo or eigth friends or foe missiles each. The Horten should pull about 16g when equipped with decend shields, capacitator, jump drive, etc.

You need to increase, NOT reduce, poly count... and by a factor of 10, roughly. 1404 polys is un-acceptably low. For a fighter, 5k would be the absolute bare minimum; 10k would be pretty modest; 20k quite acceptable; 40k would be getting heavy. We've come a long way since the days of 3D deccelerator cards, back in 1997. This is the Vegastrike engine; not Descent 1's or Fronteer Elite's; and we're in 2008, not in 1996. The VS engine uses hardware acceleration. Modern GPU's can push a million polies on your screen at full frame rate without SLI. There's no longer a need to be shy with poly counts. We got the technology; let's use it. If you must worry about something, you should worry about the size of the textures, and overdraw issues (avoid hidden surfaces; don't just interpenetrate geometry; smooth welds look pretty good, and are easy on the pixel pipeline).

Rough guideline:
Fighter: 15k triangles
Corvette: 30k tris
Cruiserer: 60 k
Carrier: 120k
Space station: 250k

Some fighters from PU:
http://wcjunction.com/temp_images/gladius/shot22.jpg
http://deeplayer.com/pu/tarsus/newtarsus_shot01.jpg
http://wcjunction.com/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... 0843#10843
http://wcnexus.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=656#656

And make sure you make the polies count. Players can tell between some non-sense carpeting of random boxes like in starwars ships, and real detail painstakingly modeled. Add some nuts and bolts, antennas, wires, recessed hatches, lids for fuel intakes, realistic hard-points for weapon mounts, make a visible cockpit interior, add sensors, shield emitters, make the engines look complex, add retro thrusters for decceleration, maneuvering thrusters... Be sure you have inch-sized stuff, as that helps make the size of a model more believable. Anything humans make has at least some 1" sized things, like hand-rails/grips, etc, as we have hands, and 1" diameter stuff is comfortable to grab, and if a pilot ever needs to go EVA, then hand-grips are essential; specially near airlock hatches. Every ship and station, no matter how big, should have at least a few inch-scale details. Make sure that edges that are supposed to have curvature are properly beveled. Etceteras.
Inch-detail in a PU corvette:
http://wcpedia.com/dw/lib/exe/fetch.php ... ame_01.jpg
http://wcpedia.com/dw/lib/exe/fetch.php ... ame_02.jpg
http://wcpedia.com/dw/lib/exe/fetch.php ... ame_03.jpg
IOW, make your ship look really good; awsome. Make people go WOW! Worrying about poly-counts today is backwards.
Read the modeling How-To's.
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/media ... tle=HowTos

Question:
If your vision is for it to be an ***orbital*** fighter, what does it need wings for? Well, if you were proposing this ship for some game in the Wing Commander universe, I would not ask, because in WC many ships look aerodynamic for no reason (and some that need to be aerodynamic aren't), and we WC fans accept that; but Vegastrike takes itself a bit more seriously.
If the idea is for this ship to be atmo-flight-capable, like a ground-to-space interceptor, then it should be VERY aerodynamic, supersonic aerodynamics apply, which the horton doesn't look like it has; --would try to minimize cross-section. But I can't imagine why there'd be a need for ground-to-space craft in a universe where there are space-stations almost everywhere.
And if this is a space-only fighter, then it doesn't need ANY kind of aerodynamics.
Form should follow function; not the other way around. One thing ships in space need big surfaces for is heat radiators.

The rest of the questions I'll leave to someone else to answer.

[kraehe]

Moin Chuck,

You need to increase, NOT reduce, poly count. 1404 polys is un-acceptably low.

Rough guideline:
Fighter: 15k triangles
Corvette: 30k tris
Cruiserer: 60 k
Carrier: 120k
Space station: 250k

# without LOD mesh(es):

* fighter 1024
* capship 2048
* station(part) 4096 ???

# Only when using LOD mesh(es):

* fighter 2048
* capship 4096
* station(part) 8192

this reminds me in old days of FlightGear screen shot combat, where it was always easier for others to shoot my low-poly Heinkel, while I was often cursed by fighting low fps. You should remind that VegaStrike is a Linux game, and the only graphic card with a good free open source driver is still old ATI9250. Well, VegaStrike could become my next game with player generated content, and I now own an nv8600GT, eating the shit closed source driver. But both FlightGear and SecondLife tought me, that there is a need to limit oneself in polycount and texture detail. Especialy many places in SecondLife are cursed by the fact, that every player thinks his private gimmik needs high poly and lots of hires textures, even if its displayed only a few pixel size most of the time.

If the idea is for this ship to be atmo-flight-capable, like a ground-to-space interceptor, then it should be VERY aerodynamic, supersonic aerodynamics apply, which the horton doesn't look like it has; --would try to minimize cross-section.

Sharp edges should be avoided on vesses suited to reenty, if the VS universe does not have any contra graph. But pilots wont survive the high G of VS fighters, without graph technology, and vessels would fall down like stones, if they are in orbit with maneuver speed only. So reenty is much slower than in real life. Maneuver speed of most merchant vessels is below mach one, so any streamlined vessel could enter normal atmosphere. It makes sense for me to provide a gauss shaped lift distribution, as its the optimum in all subsonic flight regimes. There are also shields, that can create a bubble shape in front of the vessel on entry to absorb heat, so entry could be at hot mach 3, while takeoff, landing and subsonic flight benefits from aircraft shape.

Form should follow function; not the other way around.

The VS tech is so far ahead our TL:8, that form and function are often not seen at first. The wings could be radiators. Looking at some designs I rather say: Form follows tradition. I think I even saw a preindustrial sailing boat at some wormhole. So the first question is still: What faction would need such a vessel, where would it fit into style? The blender data is avalailable: A solution is looking for a problem.

ciao,Kraehe

[chuck_starchaser]

Moin Chuck,

You need to increase, NOT reduce, poly count. 1404 polys is un-acceptably low.
Rough guideline:
Fighter: 15k triangles
Corvette: 30k tris
Cruiserer: 60 k
Carrier: 120k
Space station: 250k

# without LOD mesh(es):
* fighter 1024
* capship 2048
* station(part) 4096 ???
# Only when using LOD mesh(es):
* fighter 2048
* capship 4096
* station(part) 8192

Hmmm... that wiki How to Create Ships must have been written in 1995. It is completely obsolete.

this reminds me in old days of FlightGear screen shot combat, where it was always easier for others to shoot my low-poly Heinkel, while I was often cursed by fighting low fps. You should remind that VegaStrike is a Linux game, and the only graphic card with a good free open source driver is still old ATI9250. Well, VegaStrike could become my next game with player generated content, and I now own an nv8600GT, eating the shit closed source driver. But both FlightGear and SecondLife tought me, that there is a need to limit oneself in polycount and texture detail. Especialy many places in SecondLife are cursed by the fact, that every player thinks his private gimmik needs high poly and lots of hires textures, even if its displayed only a few pixel size most of the time.

Well, I sympathize about the issue of closed drivers, but we're not going to limit our art guidelines based on silly driver politics.

.................................

The wings could be radiators.

"Could be" is not good enough. If they are, they wouldn't look like wings; or at least not exactly. Bottom line: People should say "nice rads!", without prior knowledge.

Looking at some designs I rather say: Form follows tradition.

We want to get away from a lot of VS tradition. VS is not really happy about its current content. Much of it has been put in there under the paradigm of "let's take what we can get", but we got enough already; and what we continue to get is an unmanageable amount of garbage submissions by would-be contributors who listen to nobody but want to push and push whatever they came up with. There's probably 10 times as many ships as are really needed in VS, at the moment, but less than 1% meet such basic criteria as having retro thrusters.

This project is not a sand-box for newbie artists. It has been exactly that for too long; but not any more; and a 1404 poly mesh will go to the garbage in a reflex so fast my eyes won't even get to see a blur of it, if you know what I mean. If you disagree, that's fine, but please go offer your ship to some other game project whose team might be paranoid about poly counts for no reason whatsoever; --and there are lots of those. Besides, here we have a list of the ships we need, with names, descriptions and concept art; and a list of ships that need to be fixed or worked on. We don't accept un-requested contributions unless they happen to be truly works of excellence. Oblivion's robotic base defender is one example.

EDIT:
I just looked at that tutorial. Written in 2005. What can I say? It's ludicrous.
But then again, the whole reason for the tutorial is ludicrous, because it's about creating ships with Wings3D.
The best way to create a ship with Wings3D is to get rid of Wings3D and learn to use Blender.

[rivalin]

Yeah I don't understand the obsession with limiting graphics so severely. I don't know why there's an assumption that open source games must have rubbish graphics, open source games are open source games, not games for people with computers that can't play commercial games. In any case the poly levels we're talking about wouldn't push any decent card released in the last say three years, how many people are really still playing with a 6 series Nvidia card for example? Space sims are also ideal candidates for high poly assets, as generally there is so little crammed into the screen as opposed to FPS's, rpg's etc.

Also Vega Strike is not a linux game, it's a linux and windows and mac game, and I assume the greatest number of players are on Windows, followed by Mac and then Linux, so the game shouldn't be severely limited by one set of users refusal to install some closed drivers (and many linux users do use the closed drivers in any case)