SpaceSimCentral

Wow Nice work Steve. Things are looking good for the next alpha

....amazing, simply amazing. A high detail planetary exploration model which now also has an interior and it's made by a pro. It's almost too much... this... .... (those are tears of joy).Now I do hope this model will eventually be put to use .

since i'm back from death...some (a lot of) pics of you viper, it bare, no uc, no setup thingies exept the glow for the scoopi hope you like how i added the random material to it .it's gettin' seeded from the reg. if it's used on top, top and bottom, or not, the lizard skin has no cv because that wouldn't fitand the acid green is SUPERi hope you don't mind i added the glow in for the engine inlet(?) as scoopfurther i removed the FFED3D controls from the interior.a nice cockpit has to be made i guess, no?well it has no UC, because it's hard to handle like dan said.and unfortunately when importing the DX file to blender (known problem not only blender), all parts are either completely displaced and splattered over the whole scene, or all centered at worlds center, aligned in a way that gives me headakes.i didn't even animated the hatch, personally i don't like it opens when lowering the uc, control with a key would be fine or,maybe i can make it depend on the docking state (final) that would be best imo.ahh, that's better rather to post 12 pics, a slideshow[url]http://s790.photobucket.com/albums/yy187/potsmoke66/sshots/PIONEER/coolhands%20viper/?albumview=slideshow[/url]

hey tht fetus has a standart connection plug, i like...please go back one page to see steves viper...the cockpit of the sasquatch is a KILLER man!does anyone see a difference to the common viper in ffed3d here?i just ask because i named the hacked .exe "coolhands_viper", but actually i can't remember what is the difference.maybe i liked to get the labels back on the ship.i will examine the file.coolhand,YOU DID TRANSPARENCY WITH A PALETTESIZED 8BIT TEXTURE????????????????????????????I'M BLUFFED, no i'm impressedi found this out because i was wondering why i can have no submodels on the your viper in ffed3di se the text labels that high over the ship that they MUST appear but they are nowhere to see.any other tricks used? material setting (i tried, it had no influence) a flag ican't see?.you see i did transparency with the alpha channel of the texture jahell was concerned it's not possible without cutting through the ship, i showed him yesterday tht it's just a matter of the meshs hierarchy.but now i'm no but also and for you

potsmoke66 wrote:
hey tht fetus has a standart connection plug, i like...please go back one page to see steves viper...the cockpit of the sasquatch is a KILLER man!
Youre moving into implants and eve online type implant-pod technologyeve is an ok game along with a lot of others the exploration there is restricted , the old jump gate rubbish

finally got around to mapping the fuselage / hull. currently working on the textures.... check out the attached image. @potsmoke, yeah i think i got it down to 255 colours and 1 bit transparency... its not always practical but i think it worked here. most times you'll find people include full res images, which is fine usually but uses up a lot of resources - which is a waste in many cases as not everyone does all that much with textures anyway. ***If anyones wondering wtf we're talking about, its reducing the palette, the bit-depth of the textures to save resources and increase the frame rate, in a way so that theres little to no noticeable degradation in quality. For example photoshop or most current software from the last 14 years will by default most likely give you a 32bit image, which means for every pixel you will have 8 bits of data for red, 8 for blue and 8 for green. the remaining 8 bits define how transparent the pixel is. this means the amount of storage space, memory and so on needed for each pixel in a 32 bit image is relatively high, for example an 8 bit image of the same resolution would be capable of being passed into memory or sent down that data bus 4 times as fast as the 32 bit version because its 1/4 the size (and forget about compressed images such as jpegs, they only save space on disk, if you want to look at them you have to uncompress them and they become much larger at that point).****btw, Even for fairly high quality (non-realtime) rendering you can get away with 16 bit colours and save some rendertime and (possibly a lot of)ram for no discernible loss of quality. the dithered transparency is a sneaky trick and the only time i've ever done that, its a bit like one method that was sometimes used for sprite shadows in 2d games that didn't support transparent effects, i can't recall an example in 3d games but i'm sure its been done many times before. i also had full 32 bit versions of the textures but i'm not sure where they are now. for getting the ship into ffed3d, i did nothing special, as i've said before, i found FFED3D extremely easy to add the model and have it working in game, it required basically no effort and i made no attempt to do anything fancy so if you've spotted something strange with it, i have no idea why it might be like that. its basically just how it ported over, though i'm sure i tweaked the materials as much as i could.

yup reducing the amount of colours used if the graphics isnt required to reduce the load on the graphics card. Sort of like a middle of the PC range thing. And u can dedicate system resoruces for other uses

true, most professional games use only 8bit textures, there are many advantages to that, i.e. you can compress all to a archive and give them only a few needed palettes, you won't feel when you play the game.someway it's sad pioneer accepts only >=24bit bitmaps. else we could make maybe some advantage of that and gain a little speed for "low-end machines". since there is allway a wide range of users playing the same game, you can't assume everybody's using the latest and most modern computer.i know a lot of players here and Frontier forums still using machines from ~2000, it works fine for what they need, so why should they go and buy a new one. shurly not because of a open source game that is free to get, that would make no sense.others they have computers with stunning power, but i guess they're minor to the others.(erm, you didn't commented my conversion of your ship you might have missed it? [url]http://s790.photobucket.com/albums/yy187/potsmoke66/sshots/PIONEER/coolhands%20viper/?albumview=slideshow[/url]

well then you penalise people who do upgrade more than once a decade, and make the game less appealing to your audience because it looks dated and so experienced modellers are put off because they'd have little room to show off or build anything that would look nice in a portfolio... if that sort of thinking prevailed then no one would bother with directx updates for things, and we'd find our favourite games become unplayable on newer hardware without having an archaic machine around just to play falcon 4 or whatever. The best solution is to have some sort of scalability built in, as pioneer does already. what it does with planetary surfaces and so on i imagine are already way beyond what a 10 year old pc can cope probably even on minimum settings... but that aside dont see the sense in writing a game for a pc in 2011 (which may not even be complete for many years) freeware or not, specifically for computers that are 5 to 10 years old already.But i think thats really a moot point as pioneer is already well beyond that point, but cleverly includes the scalability. there's also the opportunity to replace cities and ships at will if they choke an ancient rig. Having said that, its still important to keep models as lean as possible because you may want many on screen at a time or have them in the same scene as a complex environment but again triangle count itself is not the be all, end all of fps. additionally, there should definately be more support for different texture formats - i'm sure this will give a good fps boost for everyone if theres a way for reducing the bitdepth of the textures or at least have more chance of running it on older video cards.btw This becomes all the more important if you have multiple maps per object, bump, spec, etc... if you can get 4 maps in the space where you used to have one, you're not going to see such a large performance impact and it wont take up any extra texture memory but will look a lot better.

My ISP has finally decided to let me connect
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well it has no UC, because it's hard to handle like dan said.and unfortunately when importing the DX file to blender (known problem not only blender), all parts are either completely displaced and splattered over the whole scene, or all centered at worlds center, aligned in a way that gives me headakes.
If you plan on making a new .lua simply copy over that section of code for the landing gear that I did, as that is still better than a pioneer scripted one.I'm with Coolhand on the whole 'technology' debate, it would be nice to see some more 'high-end' features such as parallax/bump-mapping

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i know a lot of players here and Frontier forums still using machines from ~2000, it works fine for what they need, so why should they go and buy a new one. shurly not because of a open source game that is free to get, that would make no sense.
It makes sense to me! I want to upgrade my machine specifically to play Pioneer. I just can't afford it yet. As long as people with older machines can play it on minimum settings, things will be fine.

well you have to draw a line somewhere... but people often grossly underestimate the polycounts and completely forget about shaders and textures for slowing shiz down. I'm all for maximising the size of the audience, but i dont really see why freeware has to equal crap graphics and you can in certain circumstances make the game unplayable for current or future machines, like there's concern with a number of dx7 apps that will not be supported by future graphics cards and drivers.For this model, it has a lean triangle count, but if your graphics card is struggling with its 2k maps then just run 1k or 512... and do that for other large maps also.

i read somewhere for freeware games - open source that graphics should allow to be run on machines 5-6 years old re 2 replacement cycles. Usually a balance between older PCs and nuewer PCs to look reasonably good but not to dodgy but also allows new programmers and graphics artists to contribute

Yeah, on my older machine I can run planets and cities at medium settings with a decent framerate. Perhaps models could be scaled as well, so I could run a slightly lower detailed Sasquatch. About that vehicle, there's a door way the hell up there. How do you get into it?

what is throught this doorway to hell

Orbiter Forum?

Marcel wrote:
How do you get into it?
Its a sophisticated gadget called a "ladder" Nasa's been working on it for years. but as there's no way of getting out, how you get back in is academic.