[Vasudan Admiral]

Booleans in general are very problematic - all the moreso in TS because of how unstable it is already and how hard it is to clean up afterwards. As such I think I'd recommend just leaving them un-joined.

Thinking about it more though, I would also say UV map it if you can, because then you'd be able to create some VERY impressive normal maps as well as being able to bake ambient occlusion onto the base hull map, which should create the blend without a lot of work.

That and custom textures always look much nicer than texture tiling.

[Snaga]

Ok, thanks to Vasudan Admiral´s help, the Liberty is now ready for textures, and just missing the turrets. He made the modifications needed also to lower the poly count to 30+K. So here´s a look.


EDIT: Added 2 more pics. These where taken from PCS 2.

[attachment deleted by ninja]

[TopAce]

Not bad. I like this version the best so far, and I am curious to see a textured version of it.

Could we get a shot about its down and back parts, too?

[Titan]

very purty. very.

[Turambar]

i still don't like the idea of using AO to hide bad seams.

[Vasudan Admiral]

It's a million times easier than carefully fine tuning each and every seam to blend into each other nicely though. The AO map I baked there is simply a layer of shading that should help a texture out a lot. I've done the same thing for the new Aten, and it seems to work very well for most things if applied as a multiplicative layer over all the others in the texture.
Certainly there are places where you'll need to change its strength, but I've found it to be very helpful.

I've seen a lot of good models in mods for other games kinda spoiled by bad texture/lighting handling of geometry intersections in exactly this sort of situation.

[Scourge of Ages]

Off topic:
Hey, how do you do that thing where the thumbnail just springs up right on the page instead of opening in a new window?

[chief1983]

The photo is just an attachment, instead of a link embedded in the post to a new website.  The downside is that attachments get purged more often than images on imgshack, etc.

[Scourge of Ages]

Interesting... Thanks much.

Btw, great work on the Mon Cal.

[spartan_0214]

Just curious, in-game how many of these behemoths are there going to be? More than two and my GPU will probably pop out one frame per 30 seconds...

[chief1983]

Save for something on the scale of a battle of endor, I doubt there'd ever be need to render more than 2 or 3.  And they'll be aggressively LOD'd, don't worry.

[spartan_0214]

Shiny, though I think my laptop (due mid-April) is gonna have at least an 8400M to eclipse my 6200OC. Nice that they'll be LOD'd; I don't know people's specs, but a lot of us here at HLP don't have high-end rigs, IIRC.

[chief1983]

Honestly, I can't say we'll be catering to a very low end system.  It'll have the same ability to run on low end stuff as BtRL probably, the ships will be LOD'd, and you'll be able to adjust the detail to help, but we're trying to make a new Star Wars game.  There's a handful of great Star Wars games that already run on older stuff, that never seem to get old to play, and still have an online following to some extent.  By the time it matters, I'm sure most of the community will have a computer capable of running it.  I myself am about to break down and build a new rig.  My guess is that if your computer was designed for gaming and built within the last 3 years, you should be safe, and maybe even as far back as 5 years from whenever we release.  Non-gaming rigs and laptops are always more questionable, even brand new ones sometimes have integrated video issues and such, so there's not much we can do there.

[spartan_0214]

My guess is that if your computer was designed for gaming and built within the last 3 years, you should be safe, and maybe even as far back as 5 years from whenever we release.  Non-gaming rigs and laptops are always more questionable, even brand new ones sometimes have integrated video issues and such, so there's not much we can do there.

Yeah, I was given my computer, a Compaq Presario, four years ago. It was advertised as an "Internet PC." Needless to say, I really can't wait until I get my laptop... Plus, when I return to Denver for holidays I'll be able to still game up there.

[Mobius]

Wait a second...what about the weapons?!?

[chief1983]

To be added, if you're referring to where are the weapons on the cruiser mesh.  It's just the base so far.  But it's a very stable base to start from.

[Mobius]

I don't think the films can give us reliable info about the armament...

[chief1983]

No, so we're roughly basing it on the info in the Wookieepedia, which says it has something like 60 turbolasers and 20 ions, so we'll do 40 dual turrets, 30 dual turbo and 10 dual ion.

[TopAce]

Those numbers weren't designed for gameplay.

[Mobius]

What about the firing point? Are they going to be randomized like in Colony Wars?