Model Dump

[hellcatv]

neat

[Accu-Accelerated]

Cool! I hope you make some models for the Rlaan bases also! Finally, someone's doing the Aera miningBase. Be sure to add some glowing trim to it, like on the Aelar.

[Ryder P. Moses]

There's a hollow space between the base and cone of that central tower that's gonna be all glowy, and maybe bits of the concave parts of the other structures. Wasn't the Aelar's glow supposed to represent the engines, though?

Right now I'm more concerned about making the texture look properly Aeran, though. I did basically do this when I was on a big Cylon kick, and while it looks a bit less crappy now it's still much the same with a few more stripey bits. Any ideas what a proper Aeran tex would look like?

[Accu-Accelerated]

I think the texture should probably match the Aeran ships' textures... greenish... and put a few cool-looking alien symbols on it too.

[Ryder P. Moses]

Halleck: Yeah, I wanted to make the base even wierder, with pipes snaking all across the surface to join up various complexes and such, but there's a point where you just have to say 'no' to excess sytem demands.

Er... ting. Going up tonight, I tink.

[Accu-Accelerated]

You could look at the current Aera textures, or you could recycle them for this mining base. I hope this gets into the game, since a decent Aera mining base will go a long way to making good looking alien stations. All of them are placeholders right now.

[Ryder P. Moses]

Painting the internal structures is not fun. And man it is not pretty.


That is all.

[drvoke]

@ Ryder: I can't guess the scale of that mining base.. Are all those internal hollow spaces supposed to be fly-able? That would be insanely cool!

@ All Artists: NO MORE SPACE PHALLUSES, please! There's no aerodynamic reason to make your space ships look like huge flying penises.

[Ryder P. Moses]

That's the idea. All the tunnels should come out wide enough to accomodate fighters and other light craft, albeit not comfortably.

And I'm adding some more scale-specific textures with the internal landing bay and structures. They're just very, very ugly right now, so I'm not showing them.


Also:
:P

[Halleck]

Haha... reminds me of Dr. Evil's rocket in the second Austin Powers.

[klauss]

Mwahahaha. Ha. Haha. Ha.

[drvoke]

Two things that, er, won't even work in this version of VS due to the lack of model articulation. Why did I waste my time on this, again?

That really sucks, BTW. I hope this gets implemented soon. I searched all the forums for "articulation" and this and some other seemingly unrleated thread came up.. I also searched the development wiki and got the idea that maybe this will be a feature of the OGRE port. Can anyone confirm or deny this?

[klauss]

Confirmed.
It is a feature of the Ogre port.

[Ryder P. Moses]

Sexy.


Actually... given the increased functionality of the Ogre port, should I actually design turrets that can scoot along the rails, or are those still not gonna be feasible? Pathing seems like a real long shot, 'specially since there's no vectors ingame, but I guess it can't hurt to ask.

[klauss]

It's a difficult thing to answer.

No... pathing won't be a built-in feature. Mostly because it has no immediate use, so I just can't think of a generic interface for such a thing. Feel free to look at the code, though, if you read C++, in case you feel like figuring such an interface (because if I'm presented with a nice generic interface I may include pathing after all).

But... right after the core Ogre implementation, comes taking advantage of it. That includes the seemingly unrelated C++ AI modules... .so/.dll modules that run complex AI scripts. With such an AI, you could use the prototyped Model interface to achieve pathing (models are what makes up the graphical representation of units... models... like in what you do). So... it would be possible, by using specialized AI modules.

If you think about it... every time you have a rail like that, or any other complex animation, you actually need a custom AI connecting the graphical state of the animation to the physical state of the unit (say... my 'theoretical' turret is aiming in that direction, so the rail would have to be in 'this' position).

But... ultimately, even if possible after adding C++ AI modules, it wouldn't be a trivial task (not even an easy one).

There is an easy alternative, though, that is being used in VegaTrek (IIRC): phaser banks. A set of weapon mountpoints programmed to work as one - the closest to the target fires. That would work almost like the rail turret you were talking about in the mining station... only you wouldn't see the rail moving around, and it would move instantly from one place to the other (because nothing moves). I'm not sure how phaser banks are implemented, though... perhaps you could ask someone involved with VegaTrek?

[Ryder P. Moses]

Eh, I'll just make 'em static. Way too much trouble to be worth it if the functionality ain't already there.

[chuck_starchaser]

Hey, I need pathing too, for robotic tows that move along rails. For a UI, how about just a std::vector of 3D postitions and times? At its simplest, we need doors that slide and swivel. Halleck will need that for stations and the ship elevators in the stations. Or we could just input a row of vertexes with edges into the mesh, give it a special material... Uhm... Sorry, two rows of matching vertexes: one for origins, one for up-vectors; --i.e. a strip.
( Er... What if someone enters a Moebius strip?... )

[Ryder P. Moses]

Sliding and swivelling would be simple translations that'd fall under articulation, though. It's very simple to tell a subobject to move N units in the Y-axis, or rotate so many degrees along a hot point. It's a lot more difficult to set up a system that'll let you specify movement along a complex path with geometry of its own.

Useful, too, yeah, but there's a lotta useful things that ain't worth the bother.

[Halleck]

At its simplest, we need doors that slide and swivel. Halleck will need that for stations and the ship elevators in the stations...

Just for the record, there are no engine demands from me. I consider myself a passive benefactor of work being done for other, primary reasons.

But if something gets underway, sign me up.

[klauss]

Simple pathing as in just eyecandy animation is part of Ogre... IIRC. Key-framed skeletal animation, I think it is. Never used it, but it's there, and eventually I'll make it usable in VS models as well.

The problem with the rail turrets is that they're not just eye candy... they move in order to achieve a good firing position. That's the hard stuff... not just making them move in a preprogrammed path, with preprogrammed timing.

[JonathanD]

As it is, turrets keep firing even if theres no chance at all they can hit their target, including if it's outside of their field of view, through bits of the ship they belong to, and outside the area they are capable of facing. Seems to me fixing this bit of AI has to come first if they're gonna ALSO need to relocate for better firing position...


I asked in the PR forum too, but I'll ask here... is this something I can fix in python (the turrets being dumb in when they fire?)

[Ryder P. Moses]

Klauss: If we could create triggers based on the relative position of target ship(s), keyframe animation could work. The turrets as a whole only cover a roughly 180* angle of fire from the asteroid anyway, so a simple set of three or four sectors would do the job.

Since positional triggers would be really insanely useful for a great many things, those might be more worth looking into.

[klauss]

Interesting... I'll explore that idea.

[Ryder P. Moses]

Got sidetracked. Went and started playing with pirate ship designs- designed a 360* turret and stuck it on a hacked-up Generic Civilian Vehicle. Gonna put together a little dude in a spacesuit to sit in the gun turret nest. Texes are incomplete.




I've no idea how turrets work in VS (nor, seemingly, does anyone else), but it's got only one articulation point more than the normal ones, and I can even remove that one with some basic aesthetic changes. Idea is that whatever hillbillies would use one of these might not have the best weapons or hardware in the world, but by lightening up the ship enough by skimping on armor and installing a weapon that can hit a target from any angle they'd have a pretty devastating dogfighting platform.


Also working on decimating and generally improving one of my old models, a gunship that takes the term a little too literally (count the weapons, assume near symmetry). Original was 51475 polys with a fully modelled interior and a lot of other unnecessary stuff, it's down to about half that now. Problem is that the more I cut back on geometry the more difficult it is to get the textures to compensate. Using ortho renders of the old ship as maps only works for so long- at least it was a fairly squarish model to start with, some of the capships are gonna be downright impossible.

[chuck_starchaser]

Scary MF, this last one... Man! Where do you get your textures? You must have been collecting them for like 50 years... Those graffiti are from New York; I recognize the writing