Vega Strike Forums

Wouldn't it be great to have planets that look like this?

Beautiful love the rain drops on the camera lens

Enjoy the Choice

For me, is tree (and plants in general) animation.

Most of the wind movement can be done with shaders done that way in another game I have gotten involved with a RTS one called 0AD they use collada for their animated meshes the windy trees look good.They use JavaScript for the AI and GUI and use spidermonkey to interpret the script.

Enjoy the Choice

Yes, it's rather easy with skeletal animation and some very basic oscillatory physics, but it's still a very dramatic improvement.

i would be happy with a round planet we can walk on, this is just gravy

Hicks wrote:i would be happy with a round planet we can walk on, this is just gravy

Nail head, meet hammer.

Whilst aspirations are not without merit, it would be nice to see a pragmatic bite-size approach taken to this. I feel somebody could have made significant progress by now just doing 1 bit at a time.

charlieg wrote:

Hicks wrote:i would be happy with a round planet we can walk on, this is just gravy

Nail head, meet hammer.

Whilst aspirations are not without merit, it would be nice to see a pragmatic bite-size approach taken to this. I feel somebody could have made significant progress by now just doing 1 bit at a time.

That is actually a fairly big aspiration.

Pure space games like VS and Pioneer usually use a simplified physics system that might be easy to scale to great distances and velocities, but their collision interaction is very minimal. To really make surface movement work correctly and be worthwhile, you'd need Bullet Physics integration, complete with a manager that creates and destroys Bullet Worlds on demand and merges them when they overlap. Or compile a custom double precision Bullet physics library and integrate that.

i looked at doing my own thing for a while, and if you want to try to do this, i would say use bullet with ogre. People have been looking at ogre for a while now, and there is a wrapper for bullet http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic. ... 39eee3d73e. Both are open source, which means it can be tweaked however we want. Big issue is with precision, The only way to be able to have something like the solar system and to land on each planet is to make it 64bit. It would mean that old computers wouldn't be able to run it, but it would be amazing for those that could.

Well strook and log0 got it working but nobody seemed that interested.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/vegaogre/

I didn't realise it was in a state where it could be added to the game, i thought there were still a few issues that needed to be worked out. If we can get an alpha of the game built with it i will happyily download and playtest it

It is not in a state to be added to the game. The rendering method used by VS is not compatible with planet scale dynamic lod.

As I wrote in another thread. From my pov it would be easier to write a game around a planet engine than to try hacking one into VS.

log0 wrote:It is not in a state to be added to the game. The rendering method used by VS is not compatible with planet scale dynamic lod.

Eh... I disagree. If I had the time I'd integrate it. But I don't, it's a humongous task. I do have it in mind, though, and do consider it a candidate.

What do you see as the source of incompatibility?

klauss wrote:

log0 wrote:It is not in a state to be added to the game. The rendering method used by VS is not compatible with planet scale dynamic lod.

Eh... I disagree. If I had the time I'd integrate it. But I don't, it's a humongous task. I do have it in mind, though, and do consider it a candidate.

What do you see as the source of incompatibility?

Your comments Log0 scares me a bit, could it really be that bad? It seemed all good and working. I was thinking the reason that there was not too many waves made about it was that there was no game play plans for the planets yet.

With current discussions on balance it would seem that things could change significantly as plans are made to make the game more game like, but is seems that people still want walkable planets. Myself it is less so the prospect of walking outside of the ship, but rather the interaction with the atmosphere during landing and simply the pure visual appeal of it all. As you all know I'm a fan of gravity, so I try to keep the doors open for that latter; but anything better than the docking with planets is a huge improvement. Even if there was no landing sequence but rather ships normally just jump to the surface where they are assumed to dock without visuals would be better than the simple docking with a planet in range used currently.

I would love to see planet gravity based evasive maneuvers to make use of even just the visual part of the planetary code. Though if one goes that far it would be even better go all the way and make it walkable with bases, rocks and hell why not one tree or two.

Currently the special game play of planets is their widespread interference with SPEC, which create large areas with no quick escape. Jammers would make that game play available anywhere, so then what is left to make planets interesting? Surface Base's and specialty trade? Sure, but I would think that gravity would be the answer, to make a planet a safe haven for smaller ships chased by larger ones which may not even be able to safely land. I actually think SafeModes suggestion to focus on the space near Jump Hubs would make planets more of a special case worth taking the time to: utilize the gravity in a sling shot escape; or land there to wait them out at the bar; or to even the odds by forcing the dogfight within the atmosphere. Someone even mentioned they would like to buy a Mech, LOL. To shoot what? I don't know. Maybe enemy ships by NPC Mechs on the ground, but we could ask the Coldest or Linwarrior team for advice on that XD . In all seriousness many kinds of missions are possible within the atmosphere like: Random drop off or pick up sites, Crash rescues, Tractor tug duties, target elimination. sites

klauss wrote:

log0 wrote:It is not in a state to be added to the game. The rendering method used by VS is not compatible with planet scale dynamic lod.

Eh... I disagree. If I had the time I'd integrate it. But I don't, it's a humongous task. I do have it in mind, though, and do consider it a candidate.

What do you see as the source of incompatibility?

Well, if you throw enough time at it, you can make it compatible of course. You could even write your own planet lod system while you are at it.

My comment was about using an existing implementation without essential modifications to vegastrike or/and the planet engine.

IansterGuy wrote:

klauss wrote:

log0 wrote:It is not in a state to be added to the game. The rendering method used by VS is not compatible with planet scale dynamic lod.

Eh... I disagree. If I had the time I'd integrate it. But I don't, it's a humongous task. I do have it in mind, though, and do consider it a candidate.

What do you see as the source of incompatibility?

Your comments Log0 scares me a bit, could it really be that bad? It seemed all good and working. I was thinking the reason that there was not too many waves made about it was that there was no game play plans for the planets yet.

With current discussions on balance it would seem that things could change significantly as plans are made to make the game more game like, but is seems that people still want walkable planets. Myself it is less so the prospect of walking outside of the ship, but rather the interaction with the atmosphere during landing and simply the pure visual appeal of it all. As you all know I'm a fan of gravity, so I try to keep the doors open for that latter; but anything better than the docking with planets is a huge improvement. Even if there was no landing sequence but rather ships normally just jump to the surface where they are assumed to dock without visuals would be better than the simple docking with a planet in range used currently.

I would love to see planet gravity based evasive maneuvers to make use of even just the visual part of the planetary code. Though if one goes that far it would be even better go all the way and make it walkable with bases, rocks and hell why not one tree or two.

Currently the special game play of planets is their widespread interference with SPEC, which create large areas with no quick escape. Jammers would make that game play available anywhere, so then what is left to make planets interesting? Surface Base's and specialty trade? Sure, but I would think that gravity would be the answer, to make a planet a safe haven for smaller ships chased by larger ones which may not even be able to safely land. I actually think SafeModes suggestion to focus on the space near Jump Hubs would make planets more of a special case worth taking the time to: utilize the gravity in a sling shot escape; or land there to wait them out at the bar; or to even the odds by forcing the dogfight within the atmosphere. Someone even mentioned they would like to buy a Mech, LOL. To shoot what? I don't know. Maybe enemy ships by NPC Mechs on the ground, but we could ask the Coldest or Linwarrior team for advice on that XD . In all seriousness many kinds of missions are possible within the atmosphere like: Random drop off or pick up sites, Crash rescues, Tractor tug duties, target elimination. sites

Vegastrike is a hobbyist project with very constrained resources, won't you agree?

Thus I'd rather see it focusing on core gameplay and make it really awesome instead of trying to be an all-in-one game and failing at it.

After all it is a space sim not a "friggin mechs on a planet" game.

log0 wrote:Vegastrike is a hobbyist project with very constrained resources, won't you agree

Limited by the number of developers but not constrained by any outside force. With Safemodes proposal to create immersive game play and the development of a unified coherent plan, we may be able to develop more support from people who want to work on a project clearly going somewhere.

log0 wrote:Thus I'd rather see it focusing on core gameplay and make it really awesome instead of trying to be an all-in-one game and failing at it.

I would also like the project to have it's priorities in line according to what is important, and by what is a dependency to what. I think good planetary game play has many dependencies on many other aspects of space physics and combat balance mechanisms. So I couldn't really imagine effectively implementing planetary code without first having a plan for, proper controls, or the combat balance, done in a way dynamic enough for every environment. Flight dynamics is also important to hard set first, because if it is not set much work could need redoing.

log0 wrote:After all it is a space sim not a "friggin mechs on a planet" game.

Though the door could easily be left open with no negative consequences, it seems actually the process has positive consequences by helping the developers make decisions that are more predictable and realistic. Non reality is such a wild card that can't imagine people could agree on any balance, just as it seemed to be not to long ago. So I think it is worth the time to assume that grounding things like this (mind the pun), will be included in the game eventually. Also I would not want common feature request like this, to fall off the radar after so much work has been put into it. As you may know I like finding compromises, that work. I'll say again a little differently now, 'If we neglect to reserve space for the possibility of being all-in-one eventually, then the project effectively has a planned death some time in possibly near future.' This does not suggest though that the project should not focus on what is best for game play now in the short term, just that it is not worth stone walling ambitious goals out that may be in actuality giving the project focus; opposed to the rule-less unreality.