A Stranj Request (image heavy)

[strangelet]

Hello you lot. you may remember me from such static hulls as "the
commerce station" and "the asteroid mine".

i have come here today, spurred by the EVENTUAL update of the VS main
page to make a bizarre and portentous request of the VS community.

Angels Fall First is a vast lucasian universe woven by a team of expert
artists and fiction writers. we have been building our asset base for nearly
two years and we have an extraordinary amount of fiction, art and 3d models.

We are missing one thing - a game engine. we started as a homeworld 2
mod, but the community has tailed right off. we plan to make a release on
UT2007, but that's months away.

so here's my offer - we have all these ships. theyre all game grade and
ready to go, many of them even have correctly placed weapons and LODs
and the ones that dont will soon have.

Somebody Make Us An AngelsFallFirst mod.

just input our ships into vegastrike. it couldnt be easier. most modders are
hard pressed to fill the needed art requirements, but we have it all done
already. and here's proof.











our universe is of the highest quality, with a compelling plotline and
plausible scenario. we have full time members who continue to pile up the
art and story assets pending our eventual engine.

you can check out the website here - http://affu.dendezyn.net
if you feel up to the challenge, email me.

just for clarification - i'm not giving away the rights to anything, nor the
free usage of anything, i want someone/some people to join our team as
VS modders and get the thing done. some proof of experience would be a massive bonus - im not gonna give our babies away to any old cack-handed haxxor.

i feel it will be beneficial for both AFF and VS in terms of increased exposure for both.

thanksforyourtime all

stranj xxx

[Oblivion]

Oh man oh man.
This soooo homeworldly, I feel nostalgic tears at the back of my eyes.

Stranj I think you guys at AFF are more numerous than us here. You could probably send a man or someone with coding experience to learn the engine and stuff and port your game over. But ask HellcatV and the developers first of course.

old cack-handed haxxor

hmm... it's not going to be free? The game I mean. Not usage of the models.

[Tseng]

Those models, while I have no doubt they are real and exist in game, look amazingly CGI ish in their detail, like what you'd see at the microsoft booth at E3 only to be disappointed that they got dumbed down for the final retail of the game, if you know what I mean. They are just THAT amazingly proffesional looking.

[strangelet]

nope. what you see is what you get.

they all have 5 maps, color, luma, spec, bump and alpha, and the only thing added to them in the "art" shots is antialiasing (which most vidcards do anyway these days) and fancy lighting with anisotropic shading (also a feature of high end cards)

they really do look like that in a game which supports all those maps. nexus is one game where they look absolutely perfect. and here's another shot of that station in nexus. as you can see - not alot of difference from the render.



i hate the discrepancy between box art and game art too, and there's no good reason for it with today's tech.

here's the same model in UT2004 - a lesser engine that only supports color, luma, limited specular and 4 bit alpha. still looks fantastic.

[strangelet]

- as for it being free, yes of course it will be free, as VS is open source, but im not just giving away the usage of the stuff. we only want it used for AFF purposes.

- are we more numerous? probably not. none of us have the time to embark on yet another AFF mod project. i thought some of you guys might like the opportunity to try.

[klauss]

Well... I can safely say VS will eventually get that visual quality.
Even some form of shadows, if you can bake radiosity to texture coordinates.

As you say, modern technology screenshots need not look any different from box art.

But... you'd have to make do without bumpmaps until that point, which we all hope isn't far away into the future.

[strangelet]

DUDE! the radiosity is already baked in. you think i'd miss a sweet trick like that?

[klauss]

Haha... no, stranj... not like that.

I meant dynamic soft shadows and indirect illumination based on a PRT-like technique whose "baking" step consists of a couple of special-purpose radiosity bakings.

[strangelet]

yes like that.

i use a stochastic algorhythm to bake indirect illumination into the texture as a multiplied map, which i overlay across the whole map. i also use baking to render the luma channels for things like bays and engines.

if you're referring specifically to PRT bakes, theyve been conclusively shown to have about the same effect as a bitmap bake of a radiosity shadow map for a fraction of the cpu power. the new starwars game did some stuf with PRT and abandoned it for those reasons.

[klauss]

Well, the main difference between that and what I say is that what I say is dynamic - it updates itself.
You'll get radiosity shining out of nearby stuff, be it a planet or a nearby capship or station. Self-inflicted radiosity will be out, mostly, for obvious reasons, so your kind of baking (for glowmaps) is still needed.
In short, the differece is that what I do is much simple than PRT - the environment can be dynamically updated with little expense, so the cost of the technique is quite low in comparison.
The benefit over static bakings is that environment changes have an effect. As a side-effect, I was able to implement those self-shadows which, though very gross and lacking detail, do enhance lighting quality considerably.

Those renders were made at variable FPS on a Radeon9800, 90 to 40, depending on the pixel coverage, and rest assured that the complexity of the pixel shader was mainly the occlusion mapping (a kind of parallax mapping), and not the PRT-ish thing.

BTW: you can only get this kind of reflections with
this technique, other techniques always look odd because they show the environment even through solid occlusive features.

I dunno... if the shots don't speak for themselves...

Aaanyway. Good quality graphics, ya, whenever the Ogre port gets done. Man, I want some free time to work on it.

[strangelet]

those look awesome. but 70-90 on a 7800 for ONE shader represents a fair old crunch... i dunno.

just seems to be so much effort for something that can be faked to 90 per cent of the same effect. but like i say - awesome lookin.

[Oblivion]

Well. I'm interested in helping if you like in an AFF VS mod.

I'd have to split my time between VS and AFF, but I'm really liking what I see in AFF.

So how do you envision the mod to be? SOmething more protagonist-based than the homeworld-mod probably? A space shooter, since small and large-scale fleet tactics, and ground combat mods are already taken?

Hmm... I've got some suggestions... later.

[zaydana]

Stranj - I think you probably misread it, but theres a big difference between a 7800 and a 9800

As soon as I bother to set up the new VS website theme and whatever, I'll have some spare time... I'm working on my own projects atm full time so I can put as much in as I need providing its not too much. Maybe I could follow the google rule and put 20% of my time to different projects... if so, I guess I could spare 8 - 10 hours a week on doing a mod. Only condition for me is that I can say what i've done on my portfolio at numbat.com.au (when I finish that...).

Btw, the art is fscking awesome. Can't wait till ogre is done, then I think we'd have a commercial quality game. No offense to VS' current artists, but i'd just love to see VS with a complete and consistent set of art...

[strangelet]

ooops yeah there is. my bad....

[hurleybird]

Wow, that's awesome! And yes, this could potentially give a huge boost to both projects.

[mattepiu]

Your models are great and your textures are awesome,gorgeous,
I doubt that the texturizer filter would even get near to that results.

still chewing....

[Oblivion]

Hi all. I've managed to get some AFF ships ingame. I'll be posting teh screens in the General Modding forums.

If anyone is interested in helping out a Vega Strike mod for Angels Fall First, please email me at astepintooblivion at yahoo.com or emial stranj.

Thanks.

[www2]

i found a blog post about this mod on free gamers
http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2006/10/a ... first.html

[Oblivion]

Charlieg's?

Hmm. I still haven't had any responses from interested people.

Again, I am calling for volunteers to help make this Angels Fall First mod of Vega Strike a reality. I have already had a bit of success importing AFF ships inside VS but more hands will be appreciated.

The more people helping the faster this thing gets finished. So...?

[light_gemini]

What kind of work is needed for the conversion? tweak the models? make them them entirely?

Im still very green but If I can do it I would be glad to help. Im still a bit stuck with the Camus design so I can use some time for AAF.

[klauss]

Strangelet (and his people perhaps) did the models, all that is needed is conversion (make bfxms), stats (make units.csv entries) and some other auxiliary tasks (master_parts_list.csv, faction_ships.py, etc...)

IIRC.

I don't have first-hand experience, I only have "read the code" experience.

[Oblivion]

@light_gemini:

No modeling whatsoever. minimal art stuff. I can do the conversions myself. However, I don;t know the first place to start in making the mod (having very little coding experience). It's kind of more hard work really, but one that will pay off well. So if you're interested just pm me.

BTW: I'm not going to be the lead modder or anything like that, . Just asking for interested people for now.

@klauss:

xactly. I have much less experience in those fields however, other than model conversion.

Klauss, where do you suggest I start with the mod? I really don;t know. hehe.

[klauss]

@klauss:

xactly. I have much less experience in those fields however, other than model conversion.

Klauss, where do you suggest I start with the mod? I really don;t know. hehe.

I'd suggest starting with conversion to bfxm, units.csv and faction_ships.py. Those are the most mechanical tasks, and can start right away without much of an idea about the "story" or specific universe details.

After that, you'd have to set up the universe (systems, jumps, etc...), that would be milky_way.xml and related files, maybe you'd also want to hand-craft most systems (if there aren't going to be tons like in VS - I dunno, I don't know AFF).

After that, I have no clue - you probably want to talk to Dandandaman or Jack about such stuff, they're much more knowledgable about modding than I am.

[Oblivion]

Okay, thanks. I'll get to work with the files I have from stranj atm.