Universal Forum Archive

Wohoo, man, that's excellent job , should I do the interior of the Hedgehog too? (well it will be Hedgehog anyway )

And the corridors should be angular, or could we have pillars or other stuff?

Do whatever your creative side tells you. Just don't go overboard on the poly count.

Well I made this cockpit, originally it was turret design.

Outside


Inside


It isn't finished, there will be a control pad and door too. They are only made of simple cylinders and boxes, so its not too mazy for the engine. Oh and don't the green glass misguide you, I made it green, because it is more striking than white.

Bye, I have to go to bed now, it's 5:45 am here.

Hey ironhand, try white but only in small spots, like a ceiling light on low power?

I do like the green but that's my suggestion to solving the white striking problem.

I tried to scale down the colors, and it worked, now showing the true colors of the cockpit, but still looking glass.

I put the cockpit on the ship, although it's a bit small compared to the ship, so I think I will send down the vessel or enlarge the cockpit. It depends only on the size of the avatar in the game.

You could see the cabin on the bottom of the right side of the image.

Well it turned out, that the player models are much larger than I thought. Maybe I even have to enlarge the ship too.

I like where this is going mate, keep up the good work

I see Mit has been around this week, no response from him?

Keep in mind the players will have to be running about inside the ship. So if you make it too big in comparison to the avatars you will end up with players complaining that it takes half an hour to reach the cockpit.

And no response from mitty-boy that I've seen.

Thanks Gavain, I hope it become reality some time.

I think we have enough stuff now, to show it to Mit, I mean, that this isn't only a dream.

Okay, well yes that could be boring running around, with an empty ship.
I think there will be two solutions:

1. We scale down the avatars, and the textures both.
2. We will have larger ships, with small interiors, the critical point is the cockpit, the only place on the ship where the interior, and space join.

Cockpits should have only interior view, because they are much smaller than in regular ships.

Also on behalf of simplicity, the turrets should like present ships, no interiors, just cockpit view, but without any chamberwalls, etc. And an option for an exterior view, just like now. So it would like a fighter, but it can't move , just turn.

Turrets should pack a strong punch though.

Mishka wrote:Turrets should pack a strong punch though.

I'd like to see sets of three, with it's benefit increasing with the laser, phaser and photon or whatever they are called.

Laser Dual Turrets - Rapid Fire but weaker effect, still better than main lasers though.
Laser Turbo Turret - Slower firing rate but more powerful.
Laser Scope Turret - Very accurate and packs a turbo turret's punch, but slower firing rate.

Same for photon (?) and phaser turrets, but increased cost and power difference like found with the current laser set up.

EDIT: Idea just occurred to me. Make Capital Ships have a very strong shield, so it requires a swarm of fighters to knock it down and still slowly. Gamma-ray bursts would have a side-effect of the fighters being harder to hit and only say do 10-20% damage to shields on each burst, meaning refills or large numbers necessary. Then make the hull about 3x stronger than a galcruiser. Of course, with different types of capital ships, some increase or decrease on those figures, both on shields and hull. Also number of turrets should vary and repair rates?

Well the damage and hull rates aren't clear yet (I would like to see quad lasers with dual missile fire). And the the developers will surely adjust the settings, for the sake of game balance. Also I don't know if different turret types would overcomplicate the game(in firing, not in looks), but various weapons (standard, phaser, photon) should really have different repair rates, standard could be repaired quickly, but it's slightly weaker. In my opinion the 3x Galcruiser hull, is a bit weak for a capital ship.

Is anyone outthere?

Ah, yes. Sorry. I've been working on expanding the interior of my ship a, but mostly I've been too busy or distracted by other things to really work much on it in the past week (didn't help that the forums went down).

This week is shaping up to be pretty busy. Don't expect any major progress soon.

Ironhand wrote:Well it turned out, that the player models are much larger than I thought. Maybe I even have to enlarge the ship too.

Yea, I was surprised by this too, when we used some ship models on Claden, we were surprised to see that the Gal Cruiser model (biggest space ship on TU) is the size of the tractor model, on worlds.

Scale is something that can be easily fixed after we're all done. Don't worry about it right now.

What I do (or rather am doing) is use a small box model to represent what should be the size of the player walking about the ship. The halls and rooms can then be easily shape around this standard. Once the model is ready to go in-game, it is simply a matter of scaling up the ship and/or scaling down the player's model until the player avatar matches the size of the representative box.

I don't think we should worry too much about what the proper size relationship is between a normal spacecraft (e.i. non-capital ship) and the player avatar. This is mainly because the docking bay rooms I've made are way too small for something considerably larger than a player avatar to fit (much less 20 of them).

I think it would serve our needs well if we incorporated a few standard ship models inside the docking bays of our capital ships. Just so it appears as though ships have actually landed in the CS. We might then have players spawn next to one of these ships when they "dock" in the CS.

Realism should never get too much in the way of gameplay development (especially in a low poly world such as TU). At least that's my opinion. Plus if we do ever pull this all together and get it in-game (and working), that would be a major accomplishment in itself. We could always go back and fix this stuff later if it really bugs us.

Hmm, I'm thinking, if players walk about inside the ship, along the interiors and such, what will happen when the ship turns?


And, shouldn't we have windows? Merging the interior + exterior instance would be quite a challenge for Mit. (I THINK).

Well that is what I am also thinking about, but I think we could be very grateful if ever have a ship without windows, it a bit easier, than merging the two area. so the ships movement doesn't affect the interior, almost like joining worlds.

I have already sent an e-mail to Mit and Fooli, but neither of them replied so far. I will only start to model the ship interior, if my questions are answered.

That's exactly the sort of thing I was referring to before... these kinds of decisions have to be made first before any of this can really begin. I must repeat, as well, that you're almost certainly not going to see any of this in the game and that you're probably all 'wasting' your time.

However, if we assume for a moment that any of this might happen, I think it would be safe to say that:

- the interior of a ship would work like the interior of a building - ie ,a separate "world" to the exterior "world". So you might have windows but you wouldn't be able to see people moving around inside the ship. Standing inside the ship looking out a window, you wouldn't see the universe doing its thing around you. All of which means, windows are pure decoration..

- the scale stuff you've been talking about, as fhko says, isn't really relevant. Mostly because interior/exterior would not be linked. If you build it in the right proportions for (humans, aliens, tractors, whatever) it can just be scaled as a whole if need be.

- what you'd need to think about, is how you construct an interior environment and its associated model(s). Forget about how the corridors etc fit into whatever ship design you might like externally... while it's nice if the two "match up" it's not really relevant. What is relevant is building a level as you would in a game like Quake; how you split up different areas to keep polycount down; how gameplay flows from one area to another; and how each bit is modelled and textured, which at the moment would be more akin to a bunch of separate rooms linked by doors.

None of which is in the code at the moment (see note, above, about wasting time ;)

And then there are all the gameplay issues you've been discussing, which basically sound like a whole new game to me. Have you played the HL2 mod which is just like the game you're describing? :)


So, then. We have the very basics of building interiors on worlds but not in space. And they are verrry basic. As far as I know, we only have:

- the ability to enter a building and have it display one room
- moving about that room (very poorly, because the camera doesn't work)
- and eventually, banging off enough walls to arrive at the spot where you can exit the building again.

There's a specific model converter for interiors, too, which also isn't finished yet.

We don't have:

- a very efficient interior renderer (requires different techniques to exterior)
- very good collision detection (at all)
- any real finess in controls, eg for fps style gameplay
- the ability to do stairs, doors etc
- any of the usual lighting stuff you'd see in other games

Just some thoughts if you're interested in carrying on.

What I'm working on - well, it's been on hold since mit stopped regular development - is building interiors for something more useful, like the space station (ie something we already have whicih people already use, and which doesn't require whole new game modes). Because it would be more for casual player interaction than hot laser death action, the emphasis is more about making the whole thing look slick and seamless, not worrying about gameplay stuff that doesn't exist yet.

It's still quite challenging, though, making it to look as nice as possible. It means designing, modelling and texturing a room or rooms for a funky looking spacestation interior (the bar, areas to wander around and so on), sorting out proper textures, and also lighting it properly, and baking the results... a combination of architecture, modelling, texturing and lighting skills I really don't have, but it's fun (and often frustrating) trying.

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