Author Topic: 2011-05-26 - Combat Landings (video)  (Read 22809 times)

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Offline Sushi

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2011-05-26 - Combat Landings (video)
One of the FSO engine features we've been working on is adding support for BSG-style "combat landings," where ships fly into a landing bay and skid to a halt. Without further ado, a quick&dirty FRAPS capture demonstrating this working, (music by Phrey, original for Diaspora):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxwNJVKaFO8


To make this possible, we're combining a few different things:

1. New Landing Physics
The default collision physics don't make this sort of touchdown & skid landing at all feasible. Fighters colliding with bigger ships tend to bounce pretty far back, no matter how gently you touch down or how your ship is oriented. This may make sense for retail Freespace and some mods, but wasn't going to cut it if we wanted to be able to land a Viper on a deck. We were able to add some options to the FSO engine to give us a lot more control over this: if you want the technical details, they're on the Freespace wiki.

2. New Path following
Diaspora's ships have significantly more momentum than Freespace ones do. Make a sharp turn, and you can expect to drift a ways along your original vector before straightening out. A lot of the path following code used for ship departure and docking, unfortunately, was written with Freespace's ships in mind, and our Vipers and Raptors had a hard time following the correct paths to dock or fly into a flight pod. Again, we updated the engine code to give us some more options, and the new path-following code allows our high-momentum ships to fly paths with a lot more precision. The landing paths were also given some metadata about orientation, so that ships flying into flight pods will always do so wheels-down.

3. FRED Trickery
Nothing really "new" here, just the use of SEXPS (including some recent FSO additions) in Freespace's mission designer. The main trick is that once a ship/wing is given orders to depart via fighterbay, that departure can be cancelled (so they don't just fly into the fighterbay and disappear). Letting them fly most of the departure path first, though, gets them nicely lined up for landing, and once over the deck, another SEXP is used to make the AI ships thrust gently downward.


For the future...
As neat as this is, there is plenty of room for improvement. The best thing would be real, true landing gear support: we would love to have modeled landing gears that extend out of the bottom of the ship on a keypress, and a collision physics model that works accurately with them. These improvements are not likely to make it into our first release, but will hopefully be possible in the future. If you absolutely can't live without a properly modeled landing gear... well, we can always use more coders! Volunteer today! :)
« Last Edit: November 08, 2012, 08:11:24 pm by karajorma »

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: 26-05-11 Combat Landings (video)
Badass.

 

Offline Angelus

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Re: 26-05-11 Combat Landings (video)
Abso-fraking-lutely gorgeous! The landings and the music!

One question though, do CL work if the Battlestar is moving?

 

Offline Sushi

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Re: 26-05-11 Combat Landings (video)
Abso-fraking-lutely gorgeous! The landings and the music!

One question though, do CL work if the Battlestar is moving?

Haven't really tried it yet. :) Answer is probably yes, though, although some extra SEXP-magic may be needed to keep the ships from sliding on the deck.

 
Re: 26-05-11 Combat Landings (video)
Nice! Being able to actually land your fighter would be awesome! Lets hear it for the SCP team!

 

Offline StarSlayer

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Re: 26-05-11 Combat Landings (video)
Abso-fraking-lutely gorgeous! The landings and the music!

One question though, do CL work if the Battlestar is moving?

Haven't really tried it yet. :) Answer is probably yes, though, although some extra SEXP-magic may be needed to keep the ships from sliding on the deck.

Combat landing while the Sobek does an Immelman!  :P
“Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world”

 

Offline newman

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Re: 26-05-11 Combat Landings (video)
Combat landing while the Sobek does an Immelman!  :P

Or a Cobra. Increase Sobek's MOI in the pof for maximum fun.
You know what the chain of command is? It's the chain I go get and beat you with 'til ya understand who's in ruttin' command here! - Jayne Cobb

 

Offline JGZinv

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Re: 26-05-11 Combat Landings (video)
I'm curious what the docking sequence looks like from the cockpit view.
True power comes not from strength, but from the soul and imagination.
Max to PCS2 to FS2 SCP Guide
The FringeSpace Conversion Mod

 

Offline Sushi

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Re: 26-05-11 Combat Landings (video)
I'm curious what the docking sequence looks like from the cockpit view.

I think showing off the cockpit from the inside is planned for our next video release.

If you want to see a landing from that perspective, bug CooperHawkes. :)

 

Offline Ace

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Re: 26-05-11 Combat Landings (video)
Abso-fraking-lutely gorgeous! The landings and the music!

One question though, do CL work if the Battlestar is moving?

Haven't really tried it yet. :) Answer is probably yes, though, although some extra SEXP-magic may be needed to keep the ships from sliding on the deck.

Sliding becomes an issue when the ships are moving during launch/landing. But there's a few new tricks to immobilize ships without disabling their engines so that players don't notice any wonkiness with launch or landing sequences.
Ace
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Offline Thaeris

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Re: 26-05-11 Combat Landings (video)
W
I
N
.

I'll need to sick Dragon on this one. Many thanks to Diaspora and the SCP. :D
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Offline Madcat

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Re: 26-05-11 Combat Landings (video)
That's awesome, good job!!!

 

Offline Angelus

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Re: 26-05-11 Combat Landings (video)
Abso-fraking-lutely gorgeous! The landings and the music!

One question though, do CL work if the Battlestar is moving?

Haven't really tried it yet. :) Answer is probably yes, though, although some extra SEXP-magic may be needed to keep the ships from sliding on the deck.

Sliding becomes an issue when the ships are moving during launch/landing. But there's a few new tricks to immobilize ships without disabling their engines so that players don't notice any wonkiness with launch or landing sequences.


That made me curious beyond belief!
What tricks? How exactly? Don't hold anything back!!

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: 26-05-11 Combat Landings (video)
Uh, well, there's the set-immobile/set-mobile SEXPs.

 

Offline JGZinv

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Re: 26-05-11 Combat Landings (video)
Actually I wasn't interested in the cockpit, so much as what the trip in and slow down to stop looked like from inside.
Was concerned about jerkiness or other oddities, how well it flowed.
True power comes not from strength, but from the soul and imagination.
Max to PCS2 to FS2 SCP Guide
The FringeSpace Conversion Mod

 

Offline Pred the Penguin

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Re: 26-05-11 Combat Landings (video)
Uh, well, there's the set-immobile/set-mobile SEXPs.
Way to ruin the fun. :P

heh, the vipers are landing in formation.

 

Offline Sushi

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Re: 26-05-11 Combat Landings (video)
Actually I wasn't interested in the cockpit, so much as what the trip in and slow down to stop looked like from inside.
Was concerned about jerkiness or other oddities, how well it flowed.

It looks/feels pretty good. As you can probably tell from the video, there's a tad bit of bounciness: hard to get rid of without getting situations where you occasionally fall right through the deck. In practice, though, it's not too egregious, and when we use a ship-immobilize SEXP once you're on deck and slow enough to stop, it feels very solid.

Not shown here, but the ship will respond to how you land, and sort of reorient you. If, for example, you are rotated a bit to one side or another, the act of landing will cause the ship to level out, more or less like you'd expect it to.

 

Offline JGZinv

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Re: 26-05-11 Combat Landings (video)
Sounds much how Tach did it's pad landings, which would force level you once the process was triggered.

Thanks, I'll keep my eyes peeled on this in the future.
True power comes not from strength, but from the soul and imagination.
Max to PCS2 to FS2 SCP Guide
The FringeSpace Conversion Mod

 

Offline boewolf

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Re: 26-05-11 Combat Landings (video)
By memory the original Robotech mod used a very small turret to switch between fighter and gerwalk.  The problem with that was it was not possible to switch back.  Something may be possible with some coding subsystem indestructibility SEXP while you are not in the pods.  Then press a predefined key and pow.  Landing gear down.  It may also be workable the other way around, with the smart cookies around here.

But all said and done.  Sugar and lollies (candy) are sweet.  But that is so much sweeter.  Keep up the great work people.

 

Offline AtomicClucker

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Re: 26-05-11 Combat Landings (video)
i'm quite impressed with the work you've accomplished so far. Depending on how you take the landings, how does one avoid landing safely (short on ramming)?
Blame Blue Planet for my Freespace2 addiction.