I'm envisioning AI scenarios with LRCs and dreadnoughts that park near stations with AI traffic (shuttles, lifters, etc.) moving between the ship, station and perhaps the nearest surface port. You'd find it hard to get permission to dock with the station because the bays would be full and you'd have to wait your turn. The commodity prices would be affected based on what the ship was buying and selling. One might even get permission to dock with the ship directly, perhaps based on reputation, rank, or goods on board. Such vessels would never dock or land, and be ridiculously expensive to buy.

Absolutely Marcel, anything like that must be ridiculously expensive to buy, but if possible it would add an entirely new dimension to the game play, almost a bit like a Derek Smart game aka Battlecruiser.

thats what i am working on designing

a few cruisers with the aircraft carrier style ability

all i need is someone to get them working after i model them

im thinking a dreadnought class of ship with heavy armour and bristling with turbolasers the yamato of space

im thinking huge space battles for dominance of fringe worlds between empire federation alliance and even smaller ones for wresting controll of a system from pirates, crimelords, the occasional sect and even maybe the ruling family of a system

attack ships on fire off the shoulder of orion (sorry had to quote BR i couldnt resist it)

the shards of a broken planet destroyed by some catyclysmic event or even just blown to pieces by a superlaser

huge planetary blockades where your either dogfighting your way through or commanding a fleet to glass a planet in the name of the empire

i understand their are limits but one must start small before echieving epicness and the oolite dreadnoughts expansion realy does give it an epic quality espesialy when you see one attacing a thargoid warship it is epic in every sence of the word 😆

oh and btw geraldine i loved that story but my other faves have to be the fiercest creature on altair

when a plan works well (the empire spy story)

on the wrong side of the law (captain jupiter crashes at van mannens star)

the outer limits (ya know the one about the guy that works discovering mineral rich planets for a corperation and he has a son to the richest person on the planet alista mahlbron)

actualy i love them all and the way they sort of link then get joined up by the time of full circle 😎

oh and on that basis i just thort i could have it dock then use shuttles and lifters to transport stuff like has been said tho im not sure what would work better a dreadnaught just orbiting a station as it would a planet or haveing a seperate docking facility like it would have its own kind of drydock during construction (somthing this size would probably be built by worker bee style ships whils still in space

since im still learning tho i wouldnt mind it if some one else could try to get them into the game perhaps s20dan could coz i love those stations

Sure I'd be happy to help you out.

For the moment until new features are added (if?), the best way to use the ships is like you said, as either floating next to the space station, or as a dockable station itself. The first is extremely easy to do, the second a little harder but not too hard 😉

So its up to you which way you want to get it in the game, let me know and either way I'll help you out, like Potsmoker did with me 🙂

s20dan twin lasers?

no photojob of course.

just buy yourself some

only the 1MW dual pulse are available on the market right now.

but a useful weapon for smaller ships like the cobra mk1

that it looks that good is because the guns of the cobra have the same spacing as the dual pulse laser.

if i remember right it's about 13meters, but i can be wrong.

if once comes that glorious day when we will have a (working)backfiring laser, more funny stuff can be done.

but this is like i said only a common 1MW dual pulse, you never tried one?

oh, the *@@!%& selector function?

well i struggled over that myself sometimes 😆

i guess i explained that somewhere, but i guess i will have to do that often

the secret behind is not to call it from the main model, means not from the one that contains the ships specs.

anything else works (*crossing fingers and staring to ceiling*)

edit:

it seems to be caused by the pilot respectively by the selector as i see now.

but i said seems, because sometimes the error messages lead you on a wrong trail.

i'm working on it (play soundfile)

something else i know allready is the specularity "overdrive", this causes a "soft" GL error, but it has nothing to do with the not loading ship, it only produces a endless row of error messages in stderr.

if you really like to use higher specularity as 100(%) use the color values they can be over 1 and no error occures.

i know not quite the same because if you "overdrive" the specularity level it comes very pointed.

right here is what i have as an idea

all stations can be docked at by big ships by floating in orbit relative to the station

they then transferr goods and sutch using the shuttle method as they would a planet

special docksfor these ships would be for reparing them and building them but nothing else realy but as a dry dock

other stations could be added just for other purposes of course like rock hermits for cheap parts or taxi ranks or even tour bus ranks in scenic systems both of them you dock at for odd jobs of course

you could have naval academys for each race (more on that in your race descriptions thread btw)

or even a system that has rings to fly through as a racetrack (racing missions)

just a few examples

but some of the dreadnaught specificaly the carrier class will be dockable and im talking for fighters and stuff and perhaps by cevillian craft for the recieving of fighter escort style missions we need to work out if their will be any civillian models i will have to make and what they would be used for

s20dan, good that i have a shaved head, else i would have ripped off my hair too 😆

somewhere is something i still have overseen, but WHAT? (a nasty little bug i suggest, a secret weapon of the mindbenders, some nano bug, one you can't see 👿 )

the funny thing is ican't get i work even if i strip anything else except the pilot,

but it SHOULD, i used to check my pilots in this way in the very beginning, because they didn't get loaded to modelviewer when called standalone then.

writing down even what you don't know could help sometimes...

i found the nasty little bug and eliminated him, there's now a green slimy something where he was 😆

it's not to heavy and i was allready on the right path before i went to bed (if i don't find a solution i usually do so)

first

the pilot needs LOD to be specified

second

i suggest to use a rather low value like 1 or 10 for LOD1

then call the pilot in this way

if lod > 1 then

end

that's all, once discovered the solution is mostly very simple.

this usually never happens to me because below a certain distance you won't see the pilot anyway

and i used to use LOD2 set to 10 usually (depends a little on the size of the model) to call the pilot.

i can't tell you what exactly causes this, maybe collision data don't allows requests to get_arg_string(0)

at least it has something to do with that.

i'm thinking still about a better solution

i guess i can use the colorvariable data to for the randomseed, it's a hex value, but can be turned with a C command to a common string of natural numbers. of course that would mean no control for the (advanced)user about the appearing of the pilots gender or dress color. in the actual way you can by editing your reg#(s) in the savegame.

Well done, glad you traced that down thanks. So it was because the pilot was not called with LOD ? Ok good to know.

@Spike/ /for the moment, Im pretty sure you cant have ship to ship docking of any kind. So the only way that you could dock to your big ship, is if the game thinks its a station. Which means you cant buy or fly it... Although I have never tried to give a model the flags of both ship and station, but I dont think that will work as its not designed to (yet).

So you can set the ship up as a station with a docking port and it will just be a station that looks like a ship. Later we should be able to do more with it once there is ship to ship docking and the like.

Or the other thing that you can do is just load it up with the station as an object next to the station, like the old LRC used to. It wont be dockable, it would just sit there.

It could even be made to look like it was docked to the station, via an external docking port.

aah but it must be do able because someones done it as an oolite oxp i dont know if the scource code is any differant but the theory is there

I've noticed that the posting has become a little sparse the last few days. I assume that everyone is busy redoing their models due to tomm's latest alpha. Anyway, I thought I'd post an update on my progress with the Ladybird textures. They're finally done, including the lod textures! I couldn't have done it without potsmoke (the guy, I mean). 😉 I still have to clean up the code, removing my personal notes, and I'm thinking of adding the registration numbers. I split out the model from the Taipan and changed the cockpit size to reflect the actual size of the ship. Potsmoke suggested that I scale the model to .5 which seems about right. I didn't consider that the ship weighs 60 tons. I was thinking a starfighter would be much smaller than that. It's actually more like a small freighter, a bit bigger than the Adder. I finally figured out how to check the scale by landing it next to one of the building1 chateaus (duh!). My previous windshield was about two meters tall! 😆 I also want to put the textures in their own folder in the ships folder to keep things tidy. I'll probably be ready to post it in a week or so, then I'll do the Taipan. It should go much quicker 'cause it's the same model and most of the hard work is done. I'll try to give it a different snake-like look so nobody will notice the similarities. 🙄 When I think about how much time and effort has gone into this relatively simple project, It really makes me appreciate the efforts of tomm and potsmoke66 and s20dan and unclebob and all. Thanks! You guys are great!

Hehe that made me laugh. In my case it would be couldn't have done it without potsmoke and potsmoke66 😉

60 tons isn't an awful lot when you think about it. An empty F-14 tomcat weighs 20tons,33 fully loaded. And they are much smaller than the average ship in Pioneer. Probably much closer to the Talon fighter, maybe a little bigger.

Yes it has been a little quiet here. It was my birthday so Ive been slacking somewhat but I have been working on another model.. hmm I suppose I should really finalise the other ones 😉 But the final details do feel like work sometimes, Ill get round to it.

Heres the new one Ive been working on:

Its a mix of styles so I'm not sure what to think about it, I suppose I like it but not sure how the front mixes with the back-end.

When you look at the pics imagine it as a big ship, as that is how I envisioned it. The bridge/front retracts so that it can fit into the landing area on the ground.

And well done Marcel on finally finishing your model. I would recommend adding some ship doodads using Tom's new Arguments as they seem to add that little bit of extra detail and perhaps a pilot too if you haven't already done that.

You should have no problem with that as you already have lod and landing gear, and the process is quite similar, but just give me a shout if any problems crop up.

Happy birthday! I'm liking what you've done thus far. It has a utilitarian heavy freighter look to it. If I may suggest a name for it, I'd call it a Hammerhead. I want to point out that the Ladybird is tomm's model, not mine. I don't have the skillset to make models, yet. I'm just texturing the default bare-naked models so that they look better in the shipyard because it's something that I can do, and I'm hoping that tomm will like them enough to put them into the game. Then I'll feel like I've really contributed something. I'm not up to working on it tonight.

I have a confession to make. I have become unstuck in time. I keep falling through a weird space-time warp and landing back in the early 21st century where I have to perform strange tasks before I can return to the present. It's mostly rather boring stuff, but sometimes it can be rather exciting. Uh oh, here I go again! Be seeing you! ➡

Cheers.

Hammerhead was actually one of the names I was considering, so now that you also came up with that name I'll go with that one. The other name was Albatross, but I think Hammerhead is more apt.

Personally I find texturing to be the hardest part of modelling, so if you have that nailed your well on your way.

Yes I know what you mean, those pesky time-warps, they seem to be everywhere these days. 🙂

Excellent design there s20dan. 😎

** Pulls himself free of the timewarp **

Thanks man 😎

Here's some more pics just for fun:

The Bridge:

Inside:

Outside with dirty textures:

Hey s20dan!

Really cool idea showing the full crew of three in the cockpit (cool little workstations in front of them also). This gives the ship perspective and binds what the game shows with what the player must do (hire two additional crew members (in addition to your self) to be able to fly that baby (right?)).

I haven't taken the time yet to commend you on that big space-station-dome fly-into proof-of-concept you did in that other thread. Really gives basis for execution of a lot of the ideas put forth in that thread as well.

Thank you for all the hard work s20dan. Much appreciated.

Cheers, Yes your right you will eventually need multiple crew for the ship, but probably a lot more than 3, to simulate crew in the engine room ect.

If I had it my way, you would still be able to fly a ship with limited crew, but it would not function as well, perhaps the easiest way to simulate that would be to lower thrust and shield regen values and hyperspace range (although that is rather arbitrary and there would be better ways of showing decreased efficency), I would also like to have it so that when you hire an extra crew member, they appear on the bridge, or somewhere on the ship visibly.

EG, you buy the ship, in the bridge there is only one pilot (you). Hire more guys, and more guys pop up around the ship, maybe you see one in the hangar bay or some more in the bridge.

Ideally I would have added more crew members to the bridge and some different workstations for them also but at the moment the model is right on the limit. But I should be able to fix that once I have added a full LOD setup for the ship.

Glad you liked the stations idea. Tom has added some really neat functions that will allow this to happen 😎

Like internal lighting and inside out models .

So at the moment we could have stations up to 200km radius (I think) with internal areas with their own objects and lighting.

While thats plenty of space for most spacestations, it still wont let us have the mega-stations. Like ring worlds and sphere-worlds. I'm looking forward to when we can add these, as I have run some tests and the game can easily handle real moon sized objects like ships 🙂 or stations. Its just the clipping issue, when you are more than 200km from the center and look to the side, the object disappears.(But the inside-out function might fix this ❓ )

Also there are small problems like when you haev a moon sized station orbiting a moon the same size. If it were real, they would have similar mass, which means they would orbit each other(I forget the name for this). But its a small problem whcih could be ignored.

I'm back from the 21st century, at least for the moment. It's been like a weird adventure game. Things are rather intense right now, but at least the graphics are good. 😉

Well you seem to have gotten that down. Those "dirty" textures really make it. It looks like a no-nonsense working machine. I'd almost expect an alien to be skulking around in there!

gosh, and they asked me @ sci-fi meshes if i never get banned for my nickname 😆

even when i worked sometimes so hard on it because of lack of it.

i had to help me out with coffee & tobacco then.

thanks for your rewards guys

marcel, scripting models is much harder as build one with the help of cad, i respect that.

maybe i fix up once a guide to that

something i have allready for you is a way to make a simple controlled quarter sphere.

i did that in spring, when the sphere - sphere_slice primitive didn't exists.

i guess that has made tomm laughing, but it works and you can fix up that way relatively quick a bezier quad shape which you can bend on all axes. it's to imagine to create shapes from ovals to something like a almond shape. i had some examples made then, but lost them when i lost the drive in may.

the extensions can be controlled so it could be easely animated which quickly leads to the idea of a ship like MAX (flight of the navigator).

i hope i still find the example script, i'm shure i have seen that not so long ago...

...i found one

it will have a bit a strange shading on the "tips" due to the fact that this bends the quad on the poles to tris, but if you alter that and space them 0.001 from each, it's enough to evade that problem i found out in my version for the Merlin.

(i added a quadric bezier quad to the wings front to make it more round and you might remember merlins wings goes to the very tip of the model and all lines meet at point 0)

oh what, the merlin? yes but iced up due to some other projects and some not satisfying problems with the flat for the wings, it's near to original but not quiet right. mine is basically a quadric bezier quad while frontiers is from two cubic bezier quads and the lines to connect them. i really get close to it but allways one part is turned around wrong or has wrong normals, how ever i tried. after a while i felt disapointed and stopped working on it.

i would have liked to surprise you with the finished model, but ok, now it's to late...

i added some wingtips to it to get a little closer to the original shape but, no i'm still not satisfied.

guess i would need some of the "modelers helper" to get in the right mood to pick up the model and have the right patience to work on that again.

(don't look at the wheel, i know completely wrong positioned, but i had change the setup for the wings once to make them animated so they are now completely wrong, but also ot important, first the wings have to be like i wanted them, then the uc can be fixed to it. it was allready once in a state the uc was working but like i said i couldn't get then the wings animated right and the "fin" had to be made from one of the wings to. so i reworked the wings and took the fin as base model, which is more regular as the wings itself as i found out).

that's the script for the right wing

i stripped everything from the script to show only the important lines

you can see the tip looks like all lines meet at vector 0, but in fact they are spaced 0.001, but you can never get that close in the game to see the little gap. if i wouldn't have spaced them 0.001 it would have a black shade on the wings front bezier quad (the strange divisions of the vectors are because i reworked the shape in blender and wrote back the resulting vectors from it, but it was important to have a exactly regular shaped wing, which border fits exactly to the angle of the body, this was the main problem on my first model. of course i could have used the bodys vectors for the wing like in the original, but texture would be streched then to if you texture the model and i guess that would look bad. so i build up a single wing, extracted it with GLXtractor and positioned it exactly to the body line, after i wrote down the resulting vectors. the gap that appears then i would have filled with a flexible tri, that would look somewhat more realistic rather a streched/bended texture).

if you check the vectors you can see the wing is build with the front tip facing down, so that the rotational axis is y.

the top right flat shape is build like this,

divs, normals(face up), line starts at v2(back) goes to v6(wingtip), then v8(wingtip) and the bezier leads from last vector (v8) over v2(marks zenith) to v0(front tip) and the shape will be filled to v2(start) again.

it took me a while allready to find that out and by the way i found the way how to turn the vectors around to create the same on the top left wing (vectors as comment behind the command), since you will have allways to respect that the poly's are build clockwise. when i converted the eagle i wasn't shure if that is possible at all and i chose xref_flat then for top right and bottom left (same rule as top right).

one could guess now, hey why don't you just take a different vector for the zenith of the curve and pull the curve more to the back of the model. good thinking, but the bezier shape and the triangle will overlap then.

it looks easy and logical now, but each time i start such a flat i get all kind of shapes but not the one i like to get.

something i like much about the bezier stuff, it has allways absolute harmonic curves, where ever you lead to with the basic line, total harmony. it's that absolute that it allready looks artificial. if i draw a curve by hand i have to rework it often to find such a harmony.

the original shape would look something like that

btw, i checked the wheels anim in the modelviewer right now and i'm surprised how exactly the piston is animated, really surprised, usually it gives me headakes because rotation and transpose didn't work in the same speed, but here the piston stays on one point and transposing gets faster as more as the wheel fleds from position 0. i wonder how i did that then, endless experiments (even a look at my own script didn't help me to understand what i did)?

I quite like that Merlin already, the curves are very tasty 🙂

god do i really have to read all i missed?

the bridge for the hammerhead looks cool (who did that pilot's? 😆 ). no, in fact a cool idea to put some crew in it, even if we haven't actually in pioneer.

i guess they are all females, hm? (in the modelviewer at least).

further i guess i relly should work on some cad builded pilots, because poly count is still extemely high for a detail like a pilot.

and you took 3 of them that will be about 20k only for the crew!

droids and alien members would be a idea and possible to place them randomly or linked to a argument.

Tomm,

if you read this here i would suggest a argument for the autopilot to.

i checked if it's enough just to enter a new one to the list, that will work in the modelviewer but the game has (of course) no idea about.

i had that weird idea to make the droid for the R-41 from xwa depending on the autopilot, not so important but a nice idea (nice ideas? any idea about that...? might would need a timewarp then)

i guess crew could be simply part of equipment to, you purchase a laser and get the weapons officer for free and like i said it could be selected randomly, so you won't know if you get a human, a alien (a protopode i.e.) or a droid as member.

Every pilot I have ever added appears to be a female, Im not sure if the selector works as it should (50/50)

I did a litle test on the number of tris. Max LOD with pilots and consoles is 9137 tris, and then without pilots and consoles its 7379 tris. You have to zoom right in to see the pilots, as they are only on the max lod which only appears about 20m away from the ship.

It goes up even higher once you start adding weapons and scanners too.

Thats basically why I havent released it yet, I still have yet to add a proper LOD to the main model.

I actualy mentioned this autopilot request to Tomm before, as well as more changes to appearing passengers crew ect, but he never responded... Here look:

I just spotted a reference to this offer on Boingboing. It looks like some serious modeling software for real cheap!

http://projectmessiah.com/x6/shop.html