Hey, so I've tried my hand, putting one of my old ship models ingame.
She's quite rudimentary, without landing gear, and with in need of texture and mesh cleanup, and such trivialities like LOD. Or proper gun mounts (that four hole on the side of the hull are the gun nozzles).
Not too powerful, despite it's name, or absurd number of engines. It feels quite strange for me to have 25G and such accelerations. Anyway, that can be modified.
Quite a small ship, around 14 meters wide, has 7 tonnes of propellant and 17 tonnes of overall capacity, both calculated from the volume of respective parts of the model.
Anyway, give her a spin, and decide if it fits in the game.
That's a really cool ship π
A lot of potential there to turn that into a formidable little gunship. Nice model nozmajner
It looks good parked on the new platforms created by Fluffyfreak. π
I think you're right that it needs the landing gear doing, I didn't check to see if it has a collision mesh and am at work now so can't until I get home, perhaps a few thrusters for maneuvering.
It's a nice small fighter ship though.
The style is quite "loud", anime/manga-ish - this isn't a complaint, I have Neon Blue hair myself! π
With all those engines you'd expect it to be a really high powered interceptor.
It's almost too small for a start ship but it's very close. Could go either way to a more expensive interceptor/fighter, or slower/heavier old starting ship (by this I mean how you could choose it to look).
Andy
My aim were something like you say, somewhat anime-ish. I'm willing to do different color shames too, if time allows.
I was just playing around with her stats, they can be adjusted for sure. The propellant and capacity were derived from the actual volume of the hull (or nacelles for the propellant), so I'd like to keep those, but I'm open to trying out more powerful engine stats. I found the turning speeds quite comfortable tough.
Is it possible to have more than one forward facing gun mount? (there are four nozzles embedded in the hull)
No collision mesh yet, but the thrusters are there (quite a few actually), but they are only on the texture.
Landing gear bays are also there on the texture.
Even better, I managed to dig up the old working model, and it has it's 3 LOD's too with UV-s.
Also, it would be nice to come up with a proper name instead of small courier. Any ideas?
I've managed to put some work in this ship. She now has 3 LOD levels (~9000, ~5000, ~2000 tris) and a proper landing gear animation, and a collision mesh. I had to re-texture her, because of some UV optimalization (and lost tex source files...).
She's quite overpowered (8 main thrusters and 6 retros after all... π hurray for redundancy). She has relatively small cargo hold, and some upgrade space, and 7 tonnes of propellant capacity.
Almost 30G forward acceleration when empty, half of that when full. She has some 42 000km/s deltaV when empty, and a theoretical 60 000km/s maximum.
She's a courier after all... but these stats might need some balancing (30G would crush any pilot, but the Wave and Kanara has some 26G so...). The aim is a nimble and fast craft, with sufficient self dependency and large margin of error.
Anyway here's a render with a girl for scale:
And some screen-shots of her:
I think she's mature enough to be included in the game if you like her.
Very nice work!
This amazing little ship has now the skin which it deserved
Very good job. I see the shipyard nozmajner is working hard to enter the market. People say "yes" to this ship, and looking forward.
The only problem I see is that the girl is too thin. π
Thanks!
Actually I'm right now doodling a line of ships, like from the same manufacturer. Somewhere along the roles of the current ships, plus an explorer type and a luxury "jet" like craft. One of them is that small transport I've posted months ago.
The thinness isn't the only thing "off" about that girl. She's a cartoon character with some pushed features, from an animation I'm working on.
Ooops. Maybe I shouldn't work on ships at 3am. Updated the previous post.
Thank you for spotting it.
I who should thank for their art.
That ship isn't done justice until you see it with the thrusters blasting. Love the texture work - the spec map almost works like a bump?
Thank you.
What do you mean by spec - bump? In the render there's a separate bump texture channel (Basically the one I used for planning the plating and other surface stuff.)
and some subtle automatic beveling too.
Thank you.
What do you mean by spec - bump? In the render there's a separate bump texture channel (Basically the one I used for planning the plating and other surface stuff.)
and some subtle automatic beveling too.
I imagine he's referring to the fact that the engine doesn't have actual bump map support? (unless I've really been missing something :D) and thus you've done a good job of aping a bump map with the spec one.
As far as I know, there isn't bump map support. It would be nice, but I think a dirt/wear map which would reveal with time and/or damage would be nice too. (I don't know how would two extra channels of texture impact game performance.)
Probably wouldn't affect at all performance at all. Most modern GPUs can handle 16 simultaneously bound textures without any issue. Texture reads in the shader are a bit different, but if you're just doing a single sampling (even with bi-linear filtering and mipmapping) then it's unlikely to be a bottleneck, for Pioneer anyway.
I've updated the ship to use the pattern system, so now you can have a pink one π
Also I'm posting it to the tracker for inclusion.
@ NeuralKernel:
I'm naming her Pumpkinseed as you suggested. I like the sound of it, and it works in my native language too. We use it in the mirror translation TΓΒΆkmag (meaning of the seed of a pumpkin, not the fish) on small children, so it's a good descriptive name. π
I kinda like the idea of using fish names for this shipyard thing.
A Pumpkinseed was the first fish I ever caught as a kid π
I just tried this new version. Now your small courier is my favourite ship. Very very nice... and with forward and read thrusts that are absolutely crazy. This is race ship! π
I noticed that it doesn't have the ID label. Is it intentional?
Thank you, good to hear, these ships are in a good place π
It's not intentional that there aren't ID labels, they don't work on curved surfaces, so I left them out. I might update it the model to use decals, but I'm not sure.
I was thinking about the racing aspect too, that's why I've included stuff in the wiki description about that. I have a doodle for an explicitly racing ship I'd like to make, but I think I will work on some kind of very large transport/bulk freighter first. And I want to make a huge o'neil's cylinder station too, with city scape and such.
(Just to vent some of my ideas I came up while I was on a retreat π )