Ship suggestions.

[Golden_Crow]

I really wonder if this shuld be here... But i think it will be moved if it dosent.


Well i created this topic to hear what the players of Vega Strike want when it comes to ships.


I have a few ship models (But no files. T.T) I want to see what you guys think about them.


Heres the Cutter and the V-Wing.



Heres an unnamed hevy fighter.


And the juggernaut Ultimator.

[loki1950]

Golden_Crow nice art but you have posted in the wrong forun it should be in Artwork and Content Vetting there is an established style color theme for each of our races and factions also ship types have also been proposed to fill most economic and milatary roles check our Wiki for details http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/HowTo:Contribute welcome

Enjoy the Choice [/url]

[Halleck]

Cool ships!

[Kangaroo]

Well i created this topic to hear what the players of Vega Strike want when it comes to ships.

They all are looking good, but they kinda remind me the plastic toys that little boys buy at toy stores. Maybe it's me, but I like more the ship design that looks closer to reality.

[Oblivion]

They all are looking good, but they kinda remind me the plastic toys that little boys buy at toy stores. Maybe it's me, but I like more the ship design that looks closer to reality.

I disagree. Maybe it's a tad too shiny, but nevertheless, I like them, a LOT.

I can feel myself slowly becoming disillusioned with what VS considers realistic. As I can see in the current models, all the ships seem to use technology that would have been outmoded in the 3300 AD. namely:

1.Shiny, unpainted hulls. One would think that pilots would learn to paint their ships. It's a logical step. See how cars were and are now. Cars use to be grey, black, etc. Now they're colored, modded, man, they're not even just cars anymore. I mean, Starships are not the rarity it is now. It IS a dime a dozen. I really, really would like to see homeworld style-coloration in VS.

2.No debris. a sterile space. Kinda puts you off, when there's no garbage or hulking ruins floating around. Man (and aliens besides) have been in space for a millenia. There should be evidence of civilization.

3.Stations are small. Stations now in VS all look and function the same way as the future skylab would. Flimsy rickety structures that are held together only by a few well-placed bolts. Hey man! This is ~3000 AD.
Tehre should be Space CITIES!!! Space villages, highways, squatters, massive shipyards, etc. Space is the new REAL ESTATE. Gad, I don't really like the single lonesome station placement now.

4.VS seems to be a less than fertile ground for introducing unknown technology. Most of the things here are based on real things known to us now. How about things yet to be discovered? new energy sources. New spacecraft thrusters, new weapons, new anything.... antigrav, shielding, antimatter weaponry, hyperspace/subspace,etc. ... ho-hum..

5.VS counters anything that does not seem plausible WITH CURRENT KNOWLEDGE AND TECHNOLOGY. Why?? Sure, nebulas would not seem as thick when you're inside them, but who cares? I'd like to feel like my spacecraft is cruising past clouds, not thin wisps of matter. The point is when does reality start to intrude on making the game enjoyable??

Personally, I prefer games that does not aim to be realistic. But instead aim to create an atmosphere that is both believable and beautiful at the same time. Something that just can not be done with current obsession for apollo and mir clones.

[henning]

The Ships part are from the game Galciv2. It has a Shipbuilder in game. Realy nice. If you want to see it go:

www.galciv2.com

Oh, and its a nice game too. Has no copy protection and the best ai you can get.

bye

Henning

[Oblivion]

I'd still like homeworld-style ships better. If there was a free homeworld space-shooter fan-mod i'd be hard-pressed to choose between VS or HM. But VS has more potential, as it is an entirely new universe. However, potential would not be much if we strive to avoid imitating other games to the point of creating a game no one will like. or the other extreme, imitating reality so perfectly, players would find playing VS is as enjoyable as piloting the Apollo 13 yourself.

[klauss]

5.VS counters anything that does not seem plausible WITH CURRENT KNOWLEDGE AND TECHNOLOGY. Why?? Sure, nebulas would not seem as thick when you're inside them, but who cares? I'd like to feel like my spacecraft is cruising past clouds, not thin wisps of matter. The point is when does reality start to intrude on making the game enjoyable??

Ehm... that was not a happy example.
Let me take Chuck's batton, and say that the case of nebulas has nothing to do with technology. It's nature. It's the way the universe around us is. Lightyears away, we see no dense clouds. Not one. Of course... smaller clouds might be possible, but would be extremely short-lived, if not sustained by an artificial gravity well. And though it might be possible to support such a nebula ingame, it's pointless as a nebula per-se - rather, a curious thing.
That is... you'll never have a thick nebula. You'll have thick particle clouds, maybe, of artificial origin. Debris fields, planetary rings (dense asteroid fields those are), things like that. That's what's possible (not plausible). A thick gas cloud in the middle of nowhere is simply impossible, provable with current knowledge.
Provable with current knowledge. It means we can now prove it's impossible. It does not mean "we can't prove its plausibility" - it means "we can prove its impossibility" which, let me say (risking monotoneity - and that word's an inventation of mine ), are two quite different things.

Ok... so... naturally-ocurring, long-term thick nebulas are plainly impossible. Not without some weird thing sustaining them - that is, they wouldn't be ordinary nebulas by any chance if they existed, they would be "galaxy wonders", and so you can't just sprinkle systems with them (it would defeat the wonder principle).

They are wonderful, though.
So I had once an idea to make them kind of possible, yet without contradicting known science: make them huge. At a distance, nebulas look like that, because you're looking at lightyear-thick clouds. So... if they were dynamically rendered as a background, seemingly static, it would be real cool. They would move according to the system you're in - that is, they would be present in all systems, but seen from different angles. Really nice - and systems that lay within them would be filled with colorful skies - also very nice. And the recent support for inter-system SPEC would also give us the oportunity to let you fly far enough to see them change... slowly... as if you were travelling across the stars. Also very interesting.

But that's all in the future - right now, the way nebulas are currently done is both ugly, misleading and unrealistic IMNSHO.

The clouds you want will be used, but for other phenomena - gas/waste dumps from stations, planetary clouds (with luck), even gas giants maybe (they're big, dense, gaseous clouds - you could, given enough shielding, fly into them). There are plenty of places to put those kinds of effects realistically to achieve beauty - no need to go to the unreal side of the force.

[jackS]

1.Shiny, unpainted hulls. One would think that pilots would learn to paint their ships. It's a logical step. See how cars were and are now. Cars use to be grey, black, etc. Now they're colored, modded, man, they're not even just cars anymore. I mean, Starships are not the rarity it is now. It IS a dime a dozen. I really, really would like to see homeworld style-coloration in VS.

This one isn't really a canon issue - the models mostly just don't have per-faction textures. If you'd like to take the originals and make a few different paint jobs according to faction colors, they'll start to look a lot livelier. However, in the VS universe it would be inaccurate to consider spacecraft as "a dime a dozen" - interstellar craft aren't the equivalent of cars in terms of affordability, though neither are they as rare as yachts or private jets. In-system craft are less expensive than their interstellar brethren, but the vehicle to population ratio remains significantly lower than the car to person ratio of today, and I don't just mean lower than the ratio in the industrialized nations.

2.No debris. a sterile space. Kinda puts you off, when there's no garbage or hulking ruins floating around. Man (and aliens besides) have been in space for a millenia. There should be evidence of civilization.

Agreed. More refuse is needed in inhabited areas. Chuck_starchaser was working on some junk models a while ago - I don't know what the current status of that is.

3.Stations are small. Stations now in VS all look and function the same way as the future skylab would. Flimsy rickety structures that are held together only by a few well-placed bolts. Hey man! This is ~3000 AD.
Tehre should be Space CITIES!!! Space villages, highways, squatters, massive shipyards, etc. Space is the new REAL ESTATE. Gad, I don't really like the single lonesome station placement now.

I'd disagree that all stations are small - the star fortress is over ten kilometers wide and tall - but I'll agree wholeheartedly that there is a dearth of space habitats to be found.... but not because they aren't in the to-do list.

I think one of the biggest issues with stations currently is not their individual size, but the non-sensical nature of their number and placement. You probably don't need to build a "shipyard" station that's more than a few kilometers long (as ours is), but you'd certainly expect that shipyard to be surrounded by a support infrastructure of other smaller stations, habitats, cargo depots - and it shouldn't be at all strange to see a cluster of such stations working in parallel. There is a place for lonely, isolated stations, and it is in lonely, isolated regions of space - there's currently not enough differentiation between what should be bustling, cosmopolitan settlements and what are likely mere outposts in barely habitable systems.

A lonely station, out of context, does look a small and fragile thing .

4.VS seems to be a less than fertile ground for introducing unknown technology. Most of the things here are based on real things known to us now. How about things yet to be discovered? new energy sources. New spacecraft thrusters, new weapons, new anything.... antigrav, shielding, antimatter weaponry, hyperspace/subspace,etc. ... ho-hum..

5.VS counters anything that does not seem plausible WITH CURRENT KNOWLEDGE AND TECHNOLOGY. Why?? Sure, nebulas would not seem as thick when you're inside them, but who cares? I'd like to feel like my spacecraft is cruising past clouds, not thin wisps of matter. The point is when does reality start to intrude on making the game enjoyable??

Absent picking a postion on an extremity of the continuum (not to be confused with the colloquial usage of terming something an "extreme position" though they are the same, save for negative connotations) it would appear to be hard not to find misgivings from all sides :-/

Leaving aside the differentiation between the interests of the VS core team and opinions expressed by members of the VS community, I would stress the difference between technology and "science" whereby, for science, I use the term only in its universe model/paradigm construction sense rather than refering to any particulars of the process of science. I consider VS canon to be extremely loose on the former, and mildly constrained on the latter, when it comes to limitations imposed by our current knowledge.

In terms of the paradigm we're operating within, we've augmented physics with two types of FTL and a remarkably efficient means of warping space/"gravitics" - augmentations that it would be more than kind to call questionable, and have been called far less pleasant things. Indeed, I think even those supporting the model would happily call them utterly laughable except for their utility. Even these minor djinn have caused enough internal consistency problems being let out of the bottle - going to anything even more Trek-like with its "undiscovered-principle-of-physics-of-the-week" is, in addition to being anathema to some key people, would seem likely a rather straining experience in trying to wrap one's mind around the cascading consequences.

The advance of technology beyond our ken, however, is much easier to accommodate than expansions of our universe model - things that, in the model, are possible, but currently unconstructable, are much easier to reason about, and any number of the technologies seen in VS are well beyond anything we'd have the slightest notion of how to construct currently and would seem indicitive of significant progress (and here, by using advances in technology as a metric for progress, perhaps my fondness for a certain book by Kuhn is showing) over the next several centuries. I am hard pressed to recall when lack of technical prowess to implement something was put forward as the key counter-argument to something being unsuited for the VS universe.

Personally, I prefer games that does not aim to be realistic. But instead aim to create an atmosphere that is both believable and beautiful at the same time. Something that just can not be done with current obsession for apollo and mir clones.

I wouldn't tend to call the direction taken an "aim for realism" - those who actually are aiming for realism certainly don't, and have been, on occasion, quite vocal in doing so. I prefer to think of it as an aim to preserve internal consistency of the universe model where possible, given that we've already broken it somewhat in favor of playability. It just so happens that the most consistent universe model we're familiar with (ignoring the flying spaghetti monster) is the attempted modeling of the universe we appear to ourselves be living in. This is how we have attempted to produce a believable atmosphere - or if not one that is entirely believable, then one with a limited number of difficult propositions to swallow, which can sometimes be as much as one can hope for, given some of the gameplay-style goals we have. We don't see this as counter to beauty, though it may make beauty take a more oblique path to arrive.

As for the "Apollo and Mir clones" - does that relate to some specific concerns? I'm interested in what it is that most seems to be a shortcoming - there's clearly a lot of work to be done on all fronts on VS, and additional opinions can always help to highlight what is merely unfinished and what elements may seem more fundamentally lacking.

[klauss]

IOW, What I said.
I say it because, rereading, it didn't seem clear by the posts themselves. I mean: I was unclear in my post.

a) Truly... nebulas as usually depicted are horrendously unrealistic.
b) But... they're incredibly beautiful.
c) Adding unrealistic elements has to be done with care because, as JackS said in his post, it opens up a pandora's box-worth of consequences that might be impossible to handle.
d) Some unrealistic elements are unnecessary. I, for instance, think nebulas are unnecessary. They can be introduced, with all their beauty and awe, the realistic way: as immensely far, immensely huge entities. That is awesome, don't you think? Imagine... something so big that you can see and identify from multiple star systems. If that does not inspire awe, I don't know what will.
e) The usual kind of particle clouds are still possible as particle clouds. Not gasses, which are single molecules, but debris: chunks of macroscopic matter. Like dust. Dust doesn't behave exactly like gasses - in gasses, thermal energy pushes molecules apart. In dust, only collissions do (which are much more infrequent in some conditions - like dust rings around planets or stars). So... you can still have your dust clouds, but depicting actual, feassible stellar objects, like planetary rings, debris fields, etc... They'll be equally beautiful, all you have to do is not name them nebulas.

[rigelan]

I love the idea that nebulas would be dynamically generated into the backdrop. As the position of your stellar system changes, your point of view of the nebula changes too. If we were able to do this, we could also dynamically position nearby stellar system locations into the backdrop too.

Man, wild and crazy thoughts. It'd be cool though. Maybe that would lead to some somewhat static constellations too.

[Golden_Crow]

The Ships part are from the game Galciv2. It has a Shipbuilder in game. Realy nice. If you want to see it go:

www.galciv2.com

Oh, and its a nice game too. Has no copy protection and the best ai you can get.

bye

Henning

I shuld have said that the TEXTURES are from that game.^^ (Ok maby a model or two to add to that.)
But these are old models i have had since ...... I cant really remember but i think its from when the game came out and when i saw the textures i just culdnt resist swiping them.^^

And if anyone want those textures i will be glad to send them.

P.S The backround is also from the game.

[triato]

Talking about nebulas and constelations, if any of the systems is on the outer part of the galaxy I would like to see the galaxy from it. Not sure if it is realistic but I loved it on Episode 5 of star wars.

[Oblivion]

@Golden Crow

I shuld have said that the TEXTURES are from that game.^^

Should probably need to ask permission first. Anyway, The models can't be used as it is now. cannons and turrets need to be cut off. it needs ot be aligned. Proper maps supplied. etc.

@rigelan

Man, wild and crazy thoughts. It'd be cool though. Maybe that would lead to some somewhat static constellations too.

...which leads to the old problem of procedurally/randomly generated systems and the number of existing systems.

@triato
if we could pinpoint exactly which systems lie at the rims of the galaxy. Secret jumpholes (if that could be possible) could be made to lead to stars way out of the galaxy's plane, affording views of the entire galaxy.

@klauss:

as particle clouds

Yeah!!! At last, a scientifically correct solution to an aesthetic problem. If dust/debris clouds could be made, I'm all for it.

Backdrops of true nebulas would be beautiful (erm.. STUNNING, and much better than the boring swathe of stars, stars, stars, we have now. ), i agree. But there is the problem of where. As in where in the thousands of systems would it show. And of course how, though a picture of a sufficiently magnificent nebula can easily be made.. (maybe.. ).


@JAckS:
1. okey. I thought ships were commonplace. there hasn't been any sufficiently massive calamities that hindered humanity's space expansion in VS canon, so I thought humans would be fully space-ized now. The nano plague would not have changed human habits. if at the time of the plague, ships are as easily accessible from the nano-factories; perhaps after the plague, spacegoing tendencies of humans would still have remained. But... okey dokey.

Anyway, I read General's ( ) tutorial on his making faction paintjobs for the puma (admonisher) fighter. And it sounded great. However, it was hindered by the fact that logos and colors have not been standardized.

2. I'd be willing to convert some of my stillbirth models into junk. Does VS support alpha transparencies? How? It would be useful for making masses of cables, without having to model them geometrically.

3.

the star fortress is over ten kilometers wide and tall -

which is not that evident because of the lack of bases for comparison around it. Can't the generator be made to generate stations as a group? Not as individuals?

A lonely station, out of context, does look a small and fragile thing

.

Could it be possible to set aside a specific system we have now as an experimental system for making a cosmopolitan model? I'd be willing to work, art-side. Making planetary highly-industrailized textures (are glowmaps supported with planets? Can anything be done to lessen the polygonish look?Make it a sphere, not a geosphere?) I'm always at your service, sirs

4 et 5: I'm not too sure about this, but wasn't flight dynamics based on real physics? It could be cool, if the ships acted nice, instead, ship control right now, is like steering a billiards ball.

I agree, The current FTL travel is totally impossible by current science.

I am hard pressed to recall when lack of technical prowess to implement something was put forward as the key counter-argument to something being unsuited for the VS universe.

I could recall something, somewhere... NOT MY ideas. Someone else's.

Never read Kuhn. Just discovered a copy of Childhood's end by clarke, and some short stories by silverberg in a second-hand book sale. DEVOURED them in a day.

I do agree that with several more djinns flying about, VS would be more fantasy, than science fiction. hehe. So, case to rest.
but...
...But clarke did say sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic... okay... magic would not be that welcome in VS.

We don't see this as counter to beauty, though it may make beauty take a more oblique path to arrive.

nicely said. sadly true. Space, imo, is sadly empty of beauty, at least in our immediate neighborhood.

As for the "Apollo and Mir clones" - does that relate to some specific concerns? I'm interested in what it is that most seems to be a shortcoming

ehmm. not exactly. But why do stations seem to have a lot of random useless texturing on the outside, as well as ships, particularly arrows that lead nowhere. lol. no offense to modellers, I know how hard it is to make textures. I feel like the reason is to reproduce the mass of external innards (a paradox, yippee.) that are evident in spacegoing vessels of today. Which is, considering the technology that SHOULD be present in the 3rd millenium, a mark of bad taste among station builders, or poverty. hehe. Why do we stick to the dishlike shape of antennae? and is radar/radio really the only way to get through space? I don;t mean anything specific. It's just that it's the general impression I get when entering the universe. I feel like I'm just a few decades from the present.

@klauss:

nothing to do with technology

yep, it's with knowledge.

possible (not plausible).

No i meant plausible. I know it's word-play. But with an infinite universe anything is possible, but only some things are plausible. hehe. I meant plausible.. believable. Nothing about proof. Since we can't prove nothing, anyways, just how logical would it be for human minds.

They are wonderful, though.

Si. And even though I wouldn't sprinkle star systems with them too, I'd still want to witness some.

The clouds you want will be used, but for other phenomena - gas/waste dumps from stations, planetary clouds (with luck), even gas giants maybe (they're big, dense, gaseous clouds - you could, given enough shielding, fly into them). There are plenty of places to put those kinds of effects realistically to achieve beauty - no need to go to the unreal side of the force.

luckily, you cleared up my wants with this. It's logical an d it still would be beautiful. Hoping to see some someday.

[klauss]

Alpha transparency: yes.
All kinds, but the best you can do is limit yourself to 1-bit alpha. That is: fully opaque, or fully transparent.
That's because 1-bit alpha does not require depth sorting, while true alpha blending (semitransparent stuff) does. Depth sorting is expensive, so you'd have to use it sparingly (that definitely rules out its usage in debris, as you may guess).

Note: 1-bit does not mean you have to use a 1-bit file format, only that your content has to limit itself to either full transparency or full opacity, because when put ingame, it will be specified to be a 1-bit mask (by using something called alpha-testing, rather than alpha-blending), and any gradient inbetween will be lost. The best you can do is create pngs with transparency - it's the easiest, most supported option.

[Oblivion]

okay. got it. No gradients. I'll try to read it in the wikis.

[Arren]

If the idea of dynamically generated nebula backdrops is implemented, might I suggest some spectacular photos recently taken by Hubble?