Llama

[JsnMtth]

You're doing the Llama for VS COOL!!!

[chuck_starchaser]

You're doing the Llama for VS COOL!!!

Hahaha, thanks! Well, right now Vegastrike is a friend in need. And if Vegastrike suffers, PU probably would suffer also, so the time has come for all good men to come push some polygons. Hey, what's a llama chaser compared to someone who's going to make the engine compile? So, the status appears to be that the engine compiles fine under Suse, sound is broken in Ubuntu; Mac version 0.5 works buy 0.51 fails; and Windows doesn't exist.
Sorry I've no eye-candy today; just working on the unwrap.



I keep stuff I'm not working with outside the texture area, where it doesn't bother. I'm mostly working on aligning the transversal lines, for now. Longitudinal lines will come after. The blue color is because I have the UV-stretch option turned on. If you stretch or compress a polygon it changes color, so you know how it scales relative to the average.
The stretch indicator is pretty sensitive: even a small compression or stretch produces a lot of color change; so it all being so blue means it's pretty much perfect, stretch-wise.

[JsnMtth]

Ubuntu has been having Pulseaudio problems. My coworker had no sound in Amarok until upgrading to 10. Do we have a Suse user? I can't stand that distro personally. Tried it several times due to its immense popularity, but I had YAST issues. I don't have a mac, I'll need a guinea pig. The Linux issues will be easier to fix, the windows is the hard one. Nobody designed the code to be maintained by one unified system. So when I compile on mingw, sometimes it needs to do things the unix way and does it the windows way, and sometimes it does thing the unix way and needs the windows way. I made the switch to Emacs by the way and boy do I love it. The learning curve is steep though.

[chuck_starchaser]

Oh! So this could be a problem of Ubuntu, rather than with the engine?
It's been happening for many months, though; wouldn't they fix it?

Finished the unwrap for the hull; and here's a test AO bake:



Those stupid moron phpBB developers put a grandiose new feature
in phpBB3. No matter what size you make an image, they scale it with
the worst possible quality and for no reason whatsoever, and make all
the lines jaggy. You may have to right click on them and go View Image
to see them un-ruined.
And when you do, Firefox, also for no reason whatsoever, by default
scales the image, itself, albeit with a better scaling filter; but so you've
got to click on it again. The featuritis epidemic goes on...

I still haven't applied the mirror attribute, so the unwrap only uses half
the texture (left quarter and right quarter). I'll apply the mirroring after
the greebles are unwrapped.

[chuck_starchaser]

Sorry this is taking so long.
I got the 5 of the main groups of greebles roughly laid out; 2 more to go.
All grouped around, outside the texture area. And then I have to place
thm in the texture area and finalize alignments.
I ***might*** be able to show some pics later tonight.

[chuck_starchaser]

If 6:00 am is acceptable as "later tonight", then I kept my promise.
Unwrap pretty finished, and test AO done for the whole ship and greebles.













Better catch some sleep now.

[charlieg]

Looking sharp. Can't wait to see what you have in store for us with the texture.

[chuck_starchaser]

Hehehe; I can't wait either; I've no idea yet.
Probably something really simple; ain't got enough texels to greeble the texture.
But probably mostly metal, like the Demon; unless someone has a better suggestion.

[nphillips]

Excellent, excellent!

One inconsistency I noticed, though -- in-game, the Llama has 4 gun mounts, and your model only has 2. (don't hit me!)

[chuck_starchaser]

Excellent, excellent!

One inconsistency I noticed, though -- in-game, the Llama has 4 gun mounts, and your model only has 2. (don't hit me!)

Not gonna hit you; I'm hitting myself.
Well, honestly I wondered how many gun mounts the llama had, and thought of checking in-game, but was lazy to.
The worst part is that by now it's too late. Unless I can figure a way to make VERY simple guns, that I can fit into
the texture space... I don't have much space left.
But I also wonder if we shouldn't rethink the llama's armaments. Fendorin was saying "this is not a fighting ship;
it's a cargo ship".
Morover, this is a 40-meter long monster that should be sluggish to maneuver, and therefore hard to aim with.
It would seem to me it should have turrets for defense, more so than forward guns.
Does VS have mountable turrets as sub-units, like PU does?
This would solve the problem: If we call in turrets as sub-units, then I don't need to add any new geometry; all I'd
have to add would be props to cast ambient shadowing for them, for the AO bake.

[Phlogios]

I think the Llama's role for the player should be discussed too. I never understood why the player is allowed to begin with a ship that easily kills alien fighters. There's nothing "refurbished" about the Llama - it's a killing machine. I suggest giving the player a real challenge by giving him something to work for instead. Let the player start in something more worthless, just like how they did with the Tarsus in Wing Commander: Privateer, the shuttles in the Escape Velocity games, and the equivalent in I-War 2: Edge Of Chaos.

[chuck_starchaser]

Alright, Deus; what say you?

I agree with Phlogios twice:
Once in that the player is getting too much value, even by having so much cargo space, not to
speak of fighting abilities.
Second because a 40-meter ship shouldn't be very maneuverable, but to be able to fight you
need to maneuver fast.
Shouldn't the player start with a faster but smaller ship, a small cargo space, and a laser?

And coming back to the llama, a ship so big has very little use for forward guns, since it
can't dogfight effectively. Shouldn't we give the llama a couple of turrets instead of two
more forward guns?

[Phlogios]

About the player:
How about NO laser, but room for one?
Then make the start of the game interesting enough for the player to want to earn money for a laser

[chuck_starchaser]

That would be ideal, but the issue is that while in PU weapons are mounted as sub-units, and they
appear on a ship only when you buy them, apparently Vegastrike doesn't use this feature; so one
has to put them on the mesh for them to show.
But I'm not complaining; if we did have the PU feature, then we'd have the problem of shadows,
and later PRT bakes. Multiple textures for all combinations of weapons are out of the question.
A good solution would be to have small "diference textures" that are applied by the engine on
texture load, but that would take changes in code and data. So in PU we'll have to live with
weapons casting shadows even when they aren't there.

EDIT: In the meantime, I've managed to add another pair of very simple guns. Barely fit in the
texture space. Doing a new test AO bake now. I'll edit the post again when it's done.

EDIT: Done.

[chuck_starchaser]

I've been applying attributes, namely mirror and subsurf; and made a new test AO of
slightly better quality. Got my two top LOD's organized:

LOD 0 (top LOD) with 30,450 vertices; 24,362 faces (mostly quads; so probably 45 k tris equiv.)



LOD 1 (second LOD) 12,588 vertices; 8812 faces (about 15 k tris)



I will have to come up with LOD's 2 and 3 probably.

[Deus Siddis]

Alright, Deus; what say you?
I agree with Phlogios twice:
Once in that the player is getting too much value, even by having so much cargo space, not to
speak of fighting abilities.
Second because a 40-meter ship shouldn't be very maneuverable, but to be able to fight you
need to maneuver fast.

I'm fine with the Llama losing its two light gun hard-points, but I think it should retain the two medium gun hard-points and two medium missile hard-points. Adding turrets is fine too, as is making the ship less agile- but we need to keep in mind that since 0.5 cargo add mass to a ship, so we might have to reduce cargo capacity to compensate or else new players will become bowling balls as soon as they pick up their first load.

Shouldn't the player start with a faster but smaller ship, a small cargo space, and a laser?

You mean an Alpaca?

Sure that could be done, but I think however good or bad or big or small it is, it should be about evenly balanced between trade and combat ability, since with the starting ship the player hasn't yet chosen which of these two paths (or both) to take.

And coming back to the llama, a ship so big has very little use for forward guns, since it
can't dogfight effectively. Shouldn't we give the llama a couple of turrets instead of two
more forward guns?

Sure, why not.

[chuck_starchaser]

Alright, then; I'll place hemispherical light blockers in a couple of places.

EDIT:
Or maybe just one turret right behind the cockpit...

[Deus Siddis]

Alright, then; I'll place hemispherical light blockers in a couple of places.

What are light blockers, out of curiosity?

Or maybe just one turret right behind the cockpit...

I would suggest one topside and one underside turret for full coverage, but it appears there is no good underside location for a turret on the llama.

[chuck_starchaser]

A light blocker is what I'm calling a prop to cause a shadow in the ambient occlusion,
as if a turret was there.
At run-time, we'll have a turret as a sub-unit, but it would cause no shadow; so to bake
its shadow in the AO I have to fake its presence.

Yeah, as you say, there's no room for a bottom turret.
OTOH, I did put two little guns in addition to the bigger ones, and I put a sizable
missile launching box.
Additionally, having only one turret on the top makes the game more interesting,
as your best policy is to always try to keep the top side of your ship facing your
enemy.

[chuck_starchaser]

DOH!

Such things as radiator surfaces and other common subsystems tend to take up more space to compensate for decreased efficiencies while maintaining compatibility with assorted internals and weapons systems brought in from more affluent groups. The economics of the LIHW are particularly apparent in their civilian craft...

No MetaBlack...

[chuck_starchaser]

DOH!

Such things as radiator surfaces and other common subsystems tend to take up more space to compensate for decreased efficiencies while maintaining compatibility with assorted internals and weapons systems brought in from more affluent groups. The economics of the LIHW are particularly apparent in their civilian craft...

No MetaBlack...

I'm thinking of making the entire under-side of the llama one big rad.

[nphillips]

I'm thinking of making the entire under-side of the llama one big rad.

If the LIHW are so cheap and piecemeal, why not just make them ad-hoc additions? Raised panels and such, just strapped on.

[chuck_starchaser]

I'm thinking of making the entire under-side of the llama one big rad.

If the LIHW are so cheap and piecemeal, why not just make them ad-hoc additions? Raised panels and such, just strapped on.

Raised panels, it could be. Strapped on, I don't think so; that would imply that the ship was built to not be able to dissipate heat, and then modified? But there's a problem with raised panels: They radiate part of the heat back onto your ship. You need to really raise the panels away from the ship.
But even if you did that, you wouldn't waste any area of the ship itself if you didn't have to. And I can't see a problem with using the underside of it as a rad. In fact, it makes my life easier; --don't have to think about how to greeble and texture it

[snow_Cat]

^ - -^ Makes sense, if the underside was a radiator then when docking it could 'dump' heat easily, and withstand it during launch and reentry.

purrisa.com: Freefall:Intermediate System

[chuck_starchaser]

And I think it will look good, too.
Done with converting VS backgrounds to dds cubemaps; back to the llama now.