Wow... 😮

Great crawler Coolhand - looks like just the job for crawling around small planets adn large asteroids to prospect minerals. I especially like the wheels. The cablin is very funtionable and looks like the real thing!

Yeah baby!! 🙂

Reminds me a little of the vehicle from Mass Effect 1, nice one.

Its great to see a modeller of your caliber make an appearance Steve, I'm a fan of your work the Ravenstar in particular 😉

With the current system, as you know its not possible to drive a vehicle as such, but we can kind of trick the game so it appears that you are driving it at least.

With simulated steering and wheel movements.

The suspension however, may prove to be a little more tricky to make use of, but the Lua system is very versatile so it may be that there is a way to use the suspension.

Anyway, I have some experience at coding the .lua files for the models and ships. I would most certainly be willing to help you out with getting this fine looking vehicle into the game, if you require it.

Good stuff. Our pilot model has been used to death 😉

Dan.

Thanks for the comments! yes we all liked the Mako...:) maybe to assist mining if thats implemented, it could have mineral sensors like the Mako from mass effect.

I was thinking of making the model in 2 sections, so if you don't want to lug the landing gear around.... maybe the chassis should have a vertical lift engine too so the entire thing can still fly as a stack.

But i realise there's probably no support for multi-stage vehicles at this point either:D

so you may get another plain old interplanetary shuttle out of it also. 😀

I think at the moment its something thats can be fudged into working, if the suspension doesn't work its not a big deal - perhaps if the vehicle is there then support may be added for it, if not then no matter.:)

@ Dan, Thanks! i prefer to just concentrate on the 3d side of things and would happily send it over to you to do all the hard work:D Once its textured, What 3d formats are good for you?

Steve.

Well, now that you mention it something in that area is possible.

Tom quite recently added the ability to alter the model shape depending on equipment loaded, so you could have the landing section as an upgrade which you buy for the model.

But you wouldnt be able to seperate them in flight as far as I know.

It wasn't designed for this purpose, but I see no problem in using it that way. 🙂

EDIT// Perhaps theres a way of using the missile code to seperate the two objects in flight 🙂 But thats only for seperation, not sure how they would re-attach after.

Hehe, I actually quite enjoy setting up the .luas 🙂

For me its the texturing I can't stand, probably because I always struggle to get a decent UV map 😉

Anyway, Pioneer uses .obj format so that would probably be the best format to use.

However if for any reason you dont want to or cant use .obj then I have 3dsmax2009, so any formats that max supports would be fine, such as .3ds.

I don't know if you already know this, so I will mention it anyway.

If you plan on using specularity/glows on your model then I think its best to seperate those particular parts from the model, so a glowing material can be seperately applied to them in the .lua, since Pioneer doesn't support spec maps.

Actually, if its possible to assign a glow using materials inside your CAD program, then I suppose that would alleviate that problem.

There probably is a way to make use of the suspension, but I cant personally see one. But like I have mentioned before, the .lua system is very versatile.

It's a shame Potsmoke66 isn't around at the moment, as he is more knowledgeable than myself in these matters.

Tom might also be willing to give some pointers in this area.

EDIT// I suppose we could move the suspension with the landing gear for now. To do that in Pioneer, you would need to seperate the legs and wheels from the main model and set the pivot point in the correct place, as I don't think Pioneer uses standard animations.

I could be wrong about that, they may be supported but I don't personally know how to use them in the .luas.

Im itching to have a play with this now 🙂 Im getting some ideas about how to get it to drive instead of fly.

The suspension is all setup and working, its very simple, 😆 (never trust me when i say its very simple 😆 ) its setup like 4 motorbike rear wheel swing arms without the dampers (perhaps in real life it would have active, computer controlled suspension) might also be similar to torsion bar suspension as is often used for tanks.

other capabilities the suspension has, if they are active is that it can easily change ride height - see attached pics for a demo of the rideheight.

additionally, where the suspension system attaches to the chassis there will be a sliding joint, so it could essentially walk in a primative fashion, or help haul itself over obstacles, maybe this could be controlled similar to the way the hydraulics work in GTA games?

would also look pretty dope when properly timed with some quality quartet. 😈

so ok its actually pretty complicated... but just throwing some ideas out there:D Just to get it in the sim would be fun to see! But whatever you think you can get away with, i think its worth a shot. thanks for the tips on setups... i'm sure we'll iron everything out as we go.

how can i send the model over? maybe pm me your email address... will obj format be ok?

here's a parts breakdown to help you visualise it...

there's also a turret as you can maybe see, but again i don't expect anything to happen with that right away, they're yet to be implemented too, right? also there's a question of what a small turret like that would be armed with. It could also perhaps be a self-righting mechanism...

Awesome! Just what I always wanted! Now, I hope there'll be some proper groundvehicle support for Pioneer one day. Of course, Pioneer is still early in development, so I wouldn't dare start whining about it. But you can't disagree about the fact that when you see a model like Coolhand's ground vehicle, you start dreaming and wishing (like I've been dreaming and wishing for about 15 years now).

Ah... flying to the surface in a spaceship, deploying a groundvehicle and surveyor drone. Start surveying the surface for minerals, deploy a construction drone from the spaceship, start building a miningbase on a mineral rich spot and then driving around exploring the area in the groundvehicle and deploying turrets to defend the mining base... I hope one day 😥

😎

Wow 😯 Very nice to see you here Steve 🙂 , many of us remember that exceedingly cool Viper you did for FFE3D. I am pleased to say the least, that your interested in Pioneer! 😀

Good stuff 🙂

I sent you a pm with my email Steve, ah I see you sent one back.

Anyway I hope we'll be able to do the model some justice in Pioneer.

hey, i'm glad someone does... i've been following pioneer for some time now.:)

I'm hoping dan or someone else will convert the viper from FFED3D to Pioneer at some point... all the required files should be with the FFED3D install.

i'd do it myself and it was frighteningly easy to get a fully animated model into FFED3D. however the process with pioneer seems far more involved i don't really have time to learn it. Anyway, back to the serious business of 3d modelling :D, here's the start of the texturing...

Sure I'm certainly willing to give it a go.

I've been digging through Potsmoke66 old posts in the 'Modelling for Pioneer' thread and think I have stumbled on the program that he used to convert the .x files:

Btw the texturing is already looking very sweet 😎

Yep, I think that'll do. It's only about an order of magnitude better than anything I imagined we'd have for Pioneer! 😀 It's great you've joined up Coolhand, I love that Viper too!

I think your Ravenstar would look really good in Pioneer as a military fighter 🙂

A little like the old kestrel from FFE:

What do you think?

I know you weren't asking me, but I think the Ravenstar should remain a unique Orbiter spacecraft. I've been meaning to try it, but for some reason I haven't been playing Orbiter recently. 😉 If Coolhand would like to make an actual Kestral however, that would be awesome!

whoever tries to convert the landing gear on the viper will have a fairly difficult time then, perhaps have a look at the animation in FFE and see what you think. i may still have the source for the geometry so perhaps the animation can be directly exported to lua somehow?

As for the Ravenstar, it will not be joining us here, for various reasons not least being its a joint project between myself and the talented codesmith, Doug Beachy... and its really specifically designed for orbiter.

I'd say pioneer would give it a run for its money on interplanetary simulation, but the huge power levels of the ships mean that the navigational tools and knowledge is basically irrelevant as you can always simply rocket on over to your target, which is liberating and of course totally true to Frontier, which is probably my favourite game ever... but it basically makes a tiny little Ravenstar a museum peice in the Pioneverse.:D

Btw, thats a really old pic of the ship from about 2007, the current version is more like this...:

Yeah, that's so 22nd century!

Its very cool. 😎

Shame it won't be joining us here, but I understand. And anyway, its not like we're going to be short of cool models now 🙂

Have you ever done any models for X-plane Steve?

I remember Potsmoke66's post about the landing gear on the viper giving him a headache 🙂

I'll have a look at this tonight, but if Potsmoke couldn't do it, I probably cant 😉 But I can always try. 🙄

hehe, its funny because after working with all the models from pioneer, that looks retro, when in fact it is futuristic from our persepective 🙂

I managed to convert the viper:

[attachment=325:3dsmax 2010-12-06 01-31-54-17.jpg]

I positioned everything to neutral so that the gear is ready to be animated in pioneer, however the model crashes the game with no explanation why. I've a feeling its the residual animations, or perhaps its even a by-product of converting it.. 🙁

Edit:

However, the Sasquatch seems to load fine 😎 :

[attachment=326:modelviewer-msvc-9 2010-12-06 01-41-58-06.jpg]

its also completely lost its smoothing groups... i'll see if i can dig out the original geometry.

Its a problem with Blender unfortunately, but it should be better now I have the originals.

It took bloody long enough, but here we go:

[attachment=328:modelviewer-msvc-9 2010-12-06 03-28-22-89.jpg]

[attachment=327:modelviewer-msvc-9 2010-12-06 03-28-13-49.jpg]

😉

At least it is in and working now. I just have to re-do the landing gear animations now.

Man that ship looks so sweet 🙂

As for the sasquatch, I've been unable to effectively make it 'drive' on the ground by rotating the wheels/collision model as their is no friction.

So far the wheels rotate and you can slide yourself along the floor to make it look like its driving, but then it will fall through the ground 😆

thanks dan, looks like there's some issues with uv mapping, look at the intake interior for example. aside from that its looking great.:)

I see that now, its just the way Pioneer applies textures, to fix it that part needs to be seperated from the main model so no texture is applied to it.

It is also apparent on the retro thruster recess as well as the cockpit I think.

Any chance you can whip-up a low poly version using the same texture co-ordinates for the LOD?

Also is there a video somewhere of the gear animation in action so I can see what needs to be done? The back gear is easy enough to see how that goes, but Im not so sure how the front gear works.

Edit, hehe forget it, I forgot about simply playing the animation. Hmm, that looks like it will be hard to simulate in Pioneer.

Edit2 Hmm I have an idea of how to do it, its kind of a cheat and will make the model folder larger but it will save me a hell of a lot of work 🙂

If I just save lots of various models at different stages of the animation, and load them up at the correct stage of the landing gear cycle, that should work well enough.