[Sandwich]

I think that's the biggest thing I missed from the Star Wars space sims - the 3D map. My thoughts on the implementation:

- Game pauses
- POV zooms out (smooth transition!) to a FRED-like view distance
- ambient lighting is increased so even completely shadowed parts of ships are easily visible
- a spatial grid is drawn on the "floor" plane
- vertical lines are drawn from the each ship directly downwards to the floor plane, perhaps with a little tail indicating ship heading
- fighters are rendered in LOD1 wireframe or briefing icons or whatever, with damage bars above (like strategy games have)
- capships are rendered as-is, LOD-dependant
- flight controls now control the camera position (TIE Fighter had it perfectly), with pitch and yaw rotating the camera around a fixed point on the floor grid, the POV hat (or arrow/number keys) pan around the floor grid (i.e. they move that fixed point), and primary and secondary fire (or throttle?) zooms in and out.
- further along implementation, there would be on-screen controls to view message history, events, etc, and mouse-over (clicking?) on any ship recorded in those screens would draw a line to the ship in the 3d map.
- click on a ship to target it, click again to bring up a detailed view window (akin to clicking on an icon in a briefing map), with details damage stats, cargo, subsystem selection, etc.

Basically make the 3d map a major enhancement of the sensors. If you're feeling especially rambunctious, bonus points for a Battlezone-like implementation of issuing commands.


What say you Lords of SCP? Feasable?

[Goober5000]

Bleah.  Probably a great deal of work for too little gain.  It would be nice but it would require a whole new interface screen and a bunch of annoying new stuff.  Besides, you said you haven't played FS2 in ages.

Go check out the Hosted Project Collaboration forum if you want to see something interesting.

[Sandwich]

The loadout enhancements? Saw that; that was the inspiration for this in a round-about way.

And initially you wouldn't need any interface screen at all - just blank the HUD.


EDIT: Ooh, that thread!

[WMCoolmon]

Uhm. Sounds like you want a Homeworld-style map.

*Racks brains*

First you'd need to figure out a center, probably the ship the player's in, I'm assuming. At that point it's mostly a matter of translating the coordinates of all ships into an array and drawing them every frame. Damage bars, LODs, icons, whatever are easy to do as long as the projection function works. Rather than increasing ambient lighting you might as well just render without lighting (Unless you want env mapping and such?)

Then you'd have to add controls for the camera, I haven't worked with the control system much, but I'd assume that you'd have to set the rotation amount by how long the key's been held somehow, and compensate for frame delays. Zooming would also be easy, g3_set_view_matrix does have a zoom argument, it'd just be a matter of changing that...

All in all it's possible with the current functions, but it'd take a fair amount of work. I probably know most of the functions to use from the loadout stuff, but that took a lot of trial/error to do and I still don't understand exactly how some things work - I just know they do.

[Sandwich]

Well, without being a coder, I was thinking it'd be less complex than that, since you already have functions or whatever for an external camera view. The main point would be getting a grid on the plane of the elliptic, with lines connecting the ships downwards (or upwards as the case may be) to the grid. Camera controls already exist for manipulating the extarnal camera.

[WMCoolmon]

Well, I did some poking around and manipulating the camera isn't too hard, nor does disabling ships and effects from rendering. Binding it to keys is a bit more difficult, I tried to track down the zoom in/out keys' effects, but couldn't find the function where they actually modify the view.

[Cyker]

TIE FIGHTER HAS AN IN-GAME 3D MAP!??!?!?!?!?!?

Godddamnit!!!

[vyper]

Anyway, nice idea.

[Turnsky]

Originally posted by Sandwich
I think that's the biggest thing I missed from the Star Wars space sims - the 3D map. My thoughts on the implementation:

- Game pauses
- POV zooms out (smooth transition!) to a FRED-like view distance
- ambient lighting is increased so even completely shadowed parts of ships are easily visible
- a spatial grid is drawn on the "floor" plane
- vertical lines are drawn from the each ship directly downwards to the floor plane, perhaps with a little tail indicating ship heading
- fighters are rendered in LOD1 wireframe or briefing icons or whatever, with damage bars above (like strategy games have)
- capships are rendered as-is, LOD-dependant
- flight controls now control the camera position (TIE Fighter had it perfectly), with pitch and yaw rotating the camera around a fixed point on the floor grid, the POV hat (or arrow/number keys) pan around the floor grid (i.e. they move that fixed point), and primary and secondary fire (or throttle?) zooms in and out.
- further along implementation, there would be on-screen controls to view message history, events, etc, and mouse-over (clicking?) on any ship recorded in those screens would draw a line to the ship in the 3d map.
- click on a ship to target it, click again to bring up a detailed view window (akin to clicking on an icon in a briefing map), with details damage stats, cargo, subsystem selection, etc.

Basically make the 3d map a major enhancement of the sensors. If you're feeling especially rambunctious, bonus points for a Battlezone-like implementation of issuing commands.


What say you Lords of SCP? Feasable?

kinda like Iwar2's starmap system:nod:

[Lynx]

Kazans NAV-map might be a good place to start from. Right now it only shows navpoints, but it prolly could be modified to show ships as well.

[Sandwich]

Originally posted by WMCoolmon
Well, I did some poking around and manipulating the camera isn't too hard, nor does disabling ships and effects from rendering. Binding it to keys is a bit more difficult, I tried to track down the zoom in/out keys' effects, but couldn't find the function where they actually modify the view.

Can you set an initial distance the camera zooms out to, say, 5km?

[Starman01]

Originally posted by Lynx
Kazans NAV-map might be a good place to start from. Right now it only shows navpoints, but it prolly could be modified to show ships as well.

Huh, since when is it finished ????

Did I miss something ?

[Lynx]

AFAIK it was almost finished.

[WMCoolmon]

Originally posted by Sandwich


Can you set an initial distance the camera zooms out to, say, 5km?

Yes. But the other thing I couldn't figure out was where the entries for turning the ship/camera in freelook were.

I'd like to hear more about Kazan's navmap before I do anything though. If it doesn't require WCS-specific art, it would probably be a good idea to integrate the two somehow (Like with a keypress or something to toggle between navpoints, ships, and both.)

[Turnsky]

and now, for a visual aid.



not exactly "3d" i know, but, it's oh so useful.