still i've made a mistake 😯

i guess the engine and scoop glow won't stay in hyperspace, sorry.

on the other hand that's a small leak.

I'm not sure why a fuel scoop should glow anyway. Maybe only when it's working, but you'd be too busy looking at the horizon in cockpit view to see it. It would be really cool if the scoop would only appear when you have one installed.

this is offens and of course you can only see it when fitted (while some ships have a fixed fuelscoop i.e. adder. but o.k. i'm working anyway on this model and have combined the texturs, shouldn't be a big thing to change that).

it needs to be outrigged a bit, if it has to work as cargoscoop to.

i havn't tested it, but you can set a geomflag for a collision detection of a commodity to scoop, actually i placed it a bit in front of the real scoop.

but like i said i havn't had the chance to see if that already works.

other ships will have only a fuelscoop mounting and no cargo scoop or perhaps no scop at all (fighters).

it's true it doesn't have to glow anyway, it was a style decision and not a functional one.

but something must be inside this "cave", else it looks a bit odd. if it's not a grille or some device inside, then at least something glowing 😉

in fact you won't see it while scooping. but i guess this can't be the rule, else you won't need a ship at all, because most of the time you don't see it?

then we could go back to the days of C64 and do spaceflight only by numbers, not very funny.

apart from that i'm not bad in controlling a ship like the "Atomic" manually, but i guess i would get nowhere when i can use only a calculator, i need to control a ship by view.

no joke, it took my only three tries to complete the task and i never did it that way before (without computer controlled speed).

first i ran into a dead end after hyperspacing because the fuel consumption was far to high and i used already 50% of the propellant only to accelerate to 100km/s, that's "nothing" and will take you weeks to get to the inner planets (~10AU, for the actual target). then i changed it to 10 times less assuming that i can accel. to 1000km/s with half of the fueltank. while in fact the second try i accelerated to 500km/s, but due to the gravital influence i ended at the half way close at 1000km/s, and haven't left enough propellant to break, approach and land.

the third try it worked out because i chose a speed of 300km/s, ended up at 500km/s at half way and had still 30% propellant left after reaching the planets vacinity.

unfortunately i forgot to record some minutes, but the whole trip is one approach and only interrupted because of gamesaves (which i didn't needed, except the one after hyperspacing) and stopping/starting the screen capture (keeps the clips smaller and better to handle afterwards).

did you know, we have actually systems in the game that have a entering point 1000AU from the system (a quadruple system), i wonder how to get there, or how long that it takes to get there. i cancelled the flight to this system with only the propellant a cobra mk3 can carrie you get nowhere, or only very slow. the system is Howada (4,-2,-2).

[attachment=1140:Bildschirmfoto 2012-03-26 um 13.01.jpg]

a nice "green light" in this system,

Sorry, I didn't notice that you had already done what I suggested with the scoop. 😳

I'm going to check out that system when I can. I do need to get out more. 😉

hostile worlds spaceport WIP

[attachment=1141:Bildschirmfoto 2012-03-31 um 02.37.24.png]

can't take long now...

Cool! Does that thing open and close? I like the other new buildings too! 😎

of course it does.

docking sequence will be a bit long, but as ment to be placed on hostile worlds without a breathable atmosphere it needs a proper hatch.

opens bay after closing the gate to compensate pressure or exchange gases (immidiately, else it would take far to long).

Actually, I think the original sealed space ports in Frontier were meant to open and close like that, but for some reason DB opted for a simpler way of doing it. Great work Gernot! 😎

hey, you're still alive

perhaps it was ment that way, i could open it with a iris to, but as i started the model a year ago i have planned it that way.

but yes, of course i was inspired by FE2's sealed spaceports (while i'm not sure if they aren't octagonal).

already a lot of changes have come to this model and it has been shrinked by half, the bottom has been removed, it's sunken deeper into the ground, and the lift won't go underneath 0m as it has done originally.

by now i'm still fiddling around with the animation. good god! i get it today that that the ships will open the gate when launching from either of the 3 bays (launching one immidiatly after the other will still confuse the gate animation, the problem is to have only one gate for three landing bays. anyway it should be impossible to launch/dock as long as another ship is launching/docking. i guess pioneers "space traffic controllers" doesn't take their job serious).

yes, it has only 3 bays, it could be exceeded to 6, but due to the hexagonal shape only 2, 3 or 6 makes sense, while 2 is a little less and 6 far to much.

now i "only" have to move the ships to their proper positions and mount all the docking lights to finalize it.

perhaps some antennas would do it good? or some "buildings" on the top? but that's nitpicking compared to the docking sequence.

One more question. Is the bay tall enough for... tail sitters? 😉

nah, it was, but as the thing is now half of it's original size, the bay is now w100,h90,l90 (o. w160,h100,l180) it was near to double before and could have been made a little bigger.

but the actual size of the station didn't allows a bigger bay, no not really, but i don't like to go beneath the ground, what was planned, and has worked, because as soon

as the docking procedure starts your ships collision mesh gets "killed".

but i guess i could restrict it from open if a ship is over a "Y" limit, unfortunately it won't tell you then why the gate didn't opens.

for the "Atomic" it would be big enough i guess, but due to the to high docking position, it will rest ~30m over the floor, perhaps it looks out of the roof.

it doesn't 😉 , but very close to

[attachment=1150:Bildschirmfoto 2012-04-01 um 08.58.38.png]

[attachment=1151:Bildschirmfoto 2012-04-01 um 08.59.04.png]

yes, i could have get deeper, the ship rests 20m above the terrain, this to avoid terrain is "growing" in the station.

but perhaps it would have been' better to go beneath the surface even if that looks a bit strange when docking.

it's still possible, i can add a walltile and i'm 80m lower then.

and since the docking animation is scripted the position is only a change in numbers.

unfortunately i can't rotate the ship in the proper direction of the bay, because all stations rotate along y axis, that means stations have a different alignment.

+z is +y, this allows the spacestations to rotate along z which is in fact y.

this given alignment is a bit unpractical for surface stations, because if z points upwards i can't rotate the ship.

i tried to and first was very confused about the result, then i made a drawing of the 3 vectors and rotate it until +z was +y and yep that was why it acts so strange.

the alignment (directional vectors) are v(1,0,0),v(0,1,0), looks common but remember +y is -z now (front of the ship) if you rotate the vectors the ship rotates only over "fake z" and "x" i.e. if you "mirror" x to -1 (rotate 180°) the ship will point downwards (+z resp. -y).

rotating with radians along two planes has some limits.

i've made a bundle of all stations i've made or textured without the new sealed station and i splitted the model scripts to have better access to them.

further i disabled the "big crappy" (wheel station), because it won't work in this state without the new scanner model and a certain building of mine.

so it changes foremost the "mushroom stations" (have textured docks now) and the "ground station" (sport_outdoor).

"sport_outdoor" should work standalone and shouldn't interfere with the existing ground station.

it's a mess and use it at your own risk

stations_p66_wip04-12.zip

it never does what i want it to,

it only does what i tell it.

to get the docking lights working like i want them to is a torture, friends. 😉

like it?

That looks quite amazing! The landing/launching sequence could use less pause after you reach the central area, though. And the open/close of the hatch seems really fast for a structure of that magnitude—I think much slower movement could really give it the sense of scale it needs.

Also, when moving between the center and the side dock, if the ship rotated to face the direction it was moving it would probably look less like it was magically sliding. Is this station meant to have multiple docks?

Anyway, awesome work!

three, if you have read the previous post, also i noted there that it's impossible to rotate the ship inthe desired direction, because of the alignment of the stations.

that's annoying me to, but there is no solution to that from my side (ground stations would have to be separated in the code from space stations to have a different alignment).

perhaps i will move the floor under the ship, this would look a little more reasonable then.

truely the top gate should open slower, the long pause is because of the opening of the top gate (you can't see, my cursor keys was blocked for a few seconds).

it shouldn't open before the bays door closes neither should the lift get in action before the top gate is fully opened, in fact it would need a little extra pause to flood the hatch.

it can confuse the docking animation if more then one ship is active, fortunately i saved such a situation coincidentially (i'm docking, a second ship is docking to and the third leaves the station). but i guess such moments are very rare.

further i noticed that the target vector has been moved from stage1 to the last stage, this isn't wise imo, you can't notice the proper height to the pad now.

perhaps that looks cool and is somewhat reasonable for space stations (on the other hand as soon as the docking sequence is engaged i didn't need any target or distance to know, so why?), but it's useless and a handicap for ground stations (still i guess some think apples will fall upwards).

i don't have to know and i don't mind where my docking bay is, but i have to know where the target is to engage the docking sequence.

imo, the target has to be where the geometry with geomflag(0x1n) is.

or simply guess what would happen if i mark the waypoint for the autopilot at the position of the docking bay...

the same goes to human pilots, even if they aren't so stupid to simply take the target vector and disregarding the visible situation.

personally i feel sometimes things get changed without thinking to the end neither to test the result if it's suitable.

i know my models have sometimes a lot of errors and it needs perhaps many tries to find all that isn't working like suggested and to find all misstypings,

BUT i try to test them myself in many situations until i'm satisfied or until my hands are tied 😉 .

still every time i review them i find some errors or some things that could be solved better.

with slow start and end?

Like it? No, I don't like it, I love it! 😎 I do think you should make some sort of moving floor pad for the ship.

Edit: I downloaded stations_p66_wip-04-12.zip but I don't know what to do with it. I put the included folder into the models folder. I was in orbit around Venus at the time. I returned to Eugene (my hometowns was installed) and got a very slow framerate when I landed, or loaded the saved game at Eugene. Your .lua files seem to be working because Eugene had a three pad station instead of the one pad it had before. When I start a new game on Earth I get an assertion failure in textures.cpp line 13 expression m_glTexture.

😉 i didn't expected it will run perfect

(small pause)

i'm an idiot... i know now why 😆

there is at least one big mistake i made, i called a non existing sub-model, but this will return a different error msg. i guess.

for the low framerate, i'm sorry , but it's somehow offense that both groundstation models cost some FPS, the "new" sealed one even more rather the outdoor version.

i guess this and that could be made better, or i simply reduce the animations, they cost a lot and i guess the functions needed to make it possible that the gate opens from/for every bay.

for the missing texture..., perhaps because there is still one that has a wrong path, i will check it.

you stashed it under models you said? i will see

first of all the complete wrong file

it should include only the sealed spaceport and it happened to be that the file inluded all except that. 😆

besides of that there was some mistakes i made, but all should be fine now.

i decided to add the outdoor spaceport to, but it needs a additional sub-model, the reason why i first decided not to include it.

stations_p66_wip04-12_2.zip

(clip is double speed)

p.s. i guess you can move the 0_cargo sub-model without any risk to the stations folder.

i left the old link, you can still download the other rubbish, it includes a textured mushroom station and all the rest split up to single lua files, partwisely disabled, the "big_crappy" won't work without some special submodels resp. a building.

perhaps i will put all together soon

I find it amusing that in your video the sealed spaceport is on Earth and the exposed pad is on the Moon. It'll be nice when there will be tags or something to fix that. Anyway, it works fine in alpha 20 and in the latest daily build. Thanks, beautiful work! Did you notice that in the latest daily build the ship specs are separated from the model? More work for you, I guess. I'll miss your Cobra 3 conversion for a while. I have a thought, how about a hack that would replace the old cobra 3 with yours? If you give it the same name and use the same folders, it should appear as the start up ship in the Lave system. One should be able to drop a .zip file with the proper folder structure into Pioneer and, viola!

Edit: I just started a new game in the latest nightly, bought a Sidewinder and noticed the same opaque window issue that the Cobra 3 had at first.

[attachment=1152:Sidewinder_window01.jpg]

But she still looks nice sitting there in the garage. 😀

yes, i will have to remove that from some ships.

but i noticed there are other "shaderless" issues which i can't help much, like wrong shaded models or parts of models (i.e. turn from textured to complete black, while other parts shade smooth, sometimes it's missing specularity on all random material)

sometimes you can fix it with a different hierarchy, sometimes with a additional model, sometimes i found no solution.

I've noticed the black textures, etc. It won't be a problem for me soon because I'm buying a newer (used) machine in a week or so. Just think, soon I won't be bothering you with this stuff anymore! 😀

everything's upside down 😉

converted from google sketchup, original model "russ"