Under Construction - New Fighter

Thinking about improving the Artwork in Vega Strike, or making your own Mod? Submit your question and ideas in this forum.

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Accu-Accelerated
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Under Construction - New Fighter

Post by Accu-Accelerated »

Accu-Accelerated Industries presents:

Image
Image
Image
Image

This ship is intended to be a fighter/interceptor.

Comments/suggestions are welcome.
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Post by Silverain »

A variant thought crime...

How about converting the four 'wing' nodules into fore and aft thrusters. This gives appearance based support to accel/decel capabilities (and you could do some cool scorch marks down the sides of the ship too...)
THOUGHT CRIME! [points finger] THOUGHT CRIME!
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"Wing Nodules"

Post by Accu-Accelerated »

Yeah, the four "wing nodules" are supposed to be thrusters.

They were inspired by my other ship:
(http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... php?t=3453)
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Post by Silverain »

Sorry, didn't state my thought clearly.

Alter the front of the four modules into a thruster appearence like the back of the modules. You then have trusters pointed fore and aft. It would be have high agility then I think.
THOUGHT CRIME! [points finger] THOUGHT CRIME!
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

I vote for that too. It would look nicer also, less bland from the front.

And then, wouldn't it be nice to see the front-facing thrusters glow when it's deccelerating, and the back-side thrusters glow when accelerating? That'd be the ultimate.
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Updates

Post by Accu-Accelerated »

Updated! :lol:

Image
Image

It says in the wiki how to add engine glow, and set the speed for it:
(http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/ ... ngine_Glow)

But, is is possible for the engine glow to turn on whenever the ship is decelerating? That way the forward-facing engines would be much cooler!
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Post by Halleck »

Thought you should know that your ship is facing backwards. You want it to be heading forward along the Z+ axis (the blue one).

Also, there is no way to get forward-facing engines without creating a custom bfxm for them. Even if you did, they would behave like regular engines, not retro-rockets.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Excellent!
Facilities are not present presently for engine glow control, but it shouldn't be too hard to add them. I'll see if I can spot where in the code are the acceleration parameters and the engine color material; maybe I can come up with something and run it by klauss.

(What are you talking about, Hallek? I would presume the bfxm file format doesn't force all engines to face backwards... if it were so I'd say let's dump it.)
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Post by jackS »

chuck_starchaser wrote: (What are you talking about, Hallek? I would presume the bfxm file format doesn't force all engines to face backwards... if it were so I'd say let's dump it.)
He was, I imagine, talking about the specific bfxm files containing the meshes/textures for the engine effects. The engine effects are added to units post facto, and not part of a unit's geometry.
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Re: Under Construction - New Fighter

Post by jackS »

Accu-Accelerated wrote: This ship is intended to be a fighter/interceptor.
Apologies for the delayed nature of my response, but the first thoughts that came to my mind upon seeing the shape were rather elsewhere -

Orbital/Sub-orbital puddle-jumper.
Maneuver-capable orbital bombardment ordinance.
Drop shuttle.
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Post by Halleck »

No, the bfxm format imposes no restrictions on engine direction, but all the engines currently useable in-game are facing along the Z- axis. If you wanted to have an engine facing the other way, you would need to make one which faced along the Z+ axis, and even if you did make one, it would still behave like a regular engine (get longer as your forward speed increased).

Retro-rockets are something I would deem as a worthy addition to the game engine though, and I doubt they would be all that hard to add. Anyway, we'll need to have them for the new convolution model when it's finished.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Can't be much work to copy the current engine mesh and reverse the axis.
I can write some code that throttles engines based on linear and angular acceleration. Piece of cake, actually; but I'll probably need help plugging it into the engine.
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Post by klauss »

Don't bother. I'm already revamping halos (that's how engine glows are called). And it is much harder than you think, chuck:

1) Re-structure Units.csv
2) Place the new halos in every ship
3) Make them react to acceleration and torque accordingly
. (now, this is quite hard - Acceleration is no issue, I've already
. done it in my own copy, but torque is another thing, if you don't
. want to specify much more than placement and heading -
. which is my case)
4) Last but not least, currently, the engine assumes only one set
. of halos that trigger in unison - nees quite some refactoring.
5) Post-mortem: somehow, the acceleration measures are not
. stable. Don't ask why, but when you make them react to acceleration,
. they start flickering like there's no tomorrow.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

OT
Hmm... I'd suspect one of three situations. Starting from what I think is more likely:

1) The ai controls acceleration but has too much gain, or controls push force but ignores mass, such that the change in speed is too much and it oscillates between like on and off states... or...

2) The ai controls speed instead of accel, but updates it at a different rate from that of the physics frame rate, and then accel is computed as current speed - previous speed between physical frames... or...

3) The physics model uses a single position parameter instead of two (one for current and one for previous) such that there are aliasing problems: One instance is updated before another within a single physics frame. I've seen this kind of mistake in simulation code before. Physical calculations within a frame should be calculated based on the previous frame data, so the order in which interacting objects are updated is irrelevant.

One quick and (very) dirty solution would be to low-pass filter the accel.
/OT
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Post by klauss »

Hehe. I've already done the very dirty one, but with other pursposes: the AI cuts accel from full to nip in a physics frame, making it look ugly. So I played a little "cooling off" period with a lowpass.

That indeed masks the flicker, but I'd still like to remove it. The AI controls push force, but first deciding desired speed, computing required acceleration, then required push, and clamping down to ship's limits. Then, the physics engine does the opposite, and derives new speed vectors. Somehow, the AI's push gets lost somewhere in some frames. Looks like multithreading issues, but I know there's no multithreading there. I really don't know what's going on there. I'll have to wait until hellcat returns, and ask him.
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Post by Halleck »

klauss wrote:I really don't know what's going on there. I'll have to wait until hellcat returns, and ask him.
Hellcatv is back.
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Post by klauss »

Hellcatv is back
I just realized. Thanks for the heads up, anyways.
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Post by hellcatv »

what's happening is that when the physics frame runs it zero's out the acceleration so that it may be accumulated again in the AI phase.


the game goes like this


draw physics draw ai draw collision draw ....

or if you have your framerate low enough

draw physics ai collision draw ....

anyhow I would track it by using prev_physical_state and cur_physical_state and Velocity

you can see the old velocity by doing

(prev_physical_state.position-cur_physical_state.position)/SIMULATION_ATOM
then compare that to the current velocity to find the acceleration

of course this could be from a collision ;-) but alas--the thrusters could be trying to prevent the collisiion--so it might look elite
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