[chief1983]

Well I don't know enough about the freespace engine, I just guessed that if it were broken down into submodels you could tell certain submodels to move around another one, similar to how turrets have to be submodeled.

[minilogoguy18]

well if turrets do then craft probably do as well, its just simple shape animations, i dont know much about FS2 either but i could tell you how to make a full chracter rig with controllers and make a walk animation with it.

[chief1983]

Since the FS2 engine deals mostly with rigid objects, morphing or stretching or whatever weren't really concerns of theirs when they built the engines.  The only things ever really designed to be animated on a model are turrets, and maybe some random stuff like radar dishes.  Those are all built as submodels of the whole model.  I believe that's the only way to specify for one part of a model to move in relation to another part in the FS2 engine.

[Herra Tohtori]

Rotation itself is not a problem per ce I believe. Faustus, Shivan CommNode and B5 model all use that with great success.

It's even possible to make the rotation move back and forth with something I don't even want to think about; this was used in Axem's JAD2 Disco Inferno mission.

The problem is to make the rotation dynamic so that it would be player-controllable.

The problem is actually that the hardpoints and viewpoints in POF models can't really be changed dynamically as far as I understand anything about them. You would actually need to make the entire hull of the B-Wing the rotating subobject circulating the cockpit block in order to make the view roll when the ship stays still, or to make the ship roll and view roll stay still... And I VERY much doubt that the various glowpoints, weapon hardpoints, secondary missile launcher points and stuff would keep up with it.

X-Wing's case is easier because the only moving things are primary firing points and canonically you can't fire them with S-foils closed, so in fact they are only needed in one position. But with B-Wing you would need constant altering of firing points OR apply a dynamic roll to both cockpit AND viewpoint somehow, and I don't think it's even possible.


Go with static model as far as B-Wing's cockpit system is considered. It's safe and good solution tested by LucasArts. If you think what it would add to gameplay, you'll find that it would make controlling the ship more difficult as the view wouldn't be able to directly tell you where the rest of the ship is. And rolling the ship would feel like nothing happened - except if you put center of gravity into the engine block, then the view would slowly swivel around the CoG doing full circles. Not much else would happen.

[chief1983]

One thing I believe I read was that for turrets, the firepoints can be inferred based on the glowpoint locations set in the model.  If the game could be modified to allow that to work with gun points and missile points as well, then maybe they would follow the model since that's what they're glued to.  That would probably require a bit of source code modification, but I could see it benefitting many mods, and I don't see it necessarily breaking stock fs2 compatability.  If I'm completely wrong about the turrets then ok, but I think it could still be done for the gunpoints.

[Scourge of Ages]

In the original X-Wing game, the B-Wing had a laser cannon on each wing, one ion cannon on the lower foil, and two ion cannons and a laser on the cockpit. The torpedo launchers were right next to each other, probably right above the engine dealy. I can't explain that diagram either, the one with a proton torpedo launcher on the lower foil.

What is the engine dealy anyways? Probably atmospheric in function, or possibly an ion/hydrogen collector to power the engine, shield generator, etc.

I don't know anything about animation, I just wanted to remind people that a B-Wing can't fire anything with s foils closed either. If it was possible to set points for lasers and such to be fired from relative to the point of view but independent of the model, it might simplify things.

[G0atmaster]

I was thinking you could set the center of gravity on the cockpit so the ship rotated around it.  IDK if this would work or not, but it's an idea.  Good luck guys.

[TopAce]

One other thing - While the Faustus's central rotating panel rotates at 360 degrees, the B-wing's S-foils must rotate at only 90 degrees. Also, FS radar dishes rotate around all the time, while S-foils must reverse direction. Has anyone considered this?

At any rate, I wouldn't like to sound minimalistic in terms of our models, but I don't think it would be worth the hassle. Suppose that we can make the X-wing's S-foils work as they are supposed to, but putting five times as much effort into one single fighter for the sake of some eye-candy, I think it's pointless. I played a lot of XWA when I was younger, and I never used the S-foil lever. I only saw my wings closing when I was about to enter hyperspace, and that's all. Perhaps if we added some extra speed to the player's craft with closed S-foils, it would make our efforts more worthwile, and I think it would make more sense.

My point is that even if we could get a working S-foil for the B-wing, with the craft's body rotating around the cockpit - we would still have to care about its effects on game mechanisms. More precisely, extra speed and inability to fire. And I'm not sure that would be all. Modelwise, we would also have to make subsystems rotate where they are supposed to be.

[Topgun]

In vacuum, nothing goes through the intakes so the only way they could be used for cooling in space is to be radiators, since obviously they do not spew coolant forwards. Hopefully. They are also way too small to be radiators of any significant power. So that leads me to think that they are in fact only used in atmosphere. It's possible that in atmospheric flight, craft such as X-Wing and B-Wing are able to use air as primary propellant, ie. using their engines as some sort of ramjets that take in air, superheat it and blast it out of their end.

I thought b-wings could not fly in atmosphere? I mean does it look like it can?

[BS403]

One other thing - While the Faustus's central rotating panel rotates at 360 degrees, the B-wing's S-foils must rotate at only 90 degrees. Also, FS radar dishes rotate around all the time, while S-foils must reverse direction. Has anyone considered this?

At any rate, I wouldn't like to sound minimalistic in terms of our models, but I don't think it would be worth the hassle. Suppose that we can make the X-wing's S-foils work as they are supposed to, but putting five times as much effort into one single fighter for the sake of some eye-candy, I think it's pointless. I played a lot of XWA when I was younger, and I never used the S-foil lever. I only saw my wings closing when I was about to enter hyperspace, and that's all. Perhaps if we added some extra speed to the player's craft with closed S-foils, it would make our efforts more worthwile, and I think it would make more sense.

My point is that even if we could get a working S-foil for the B-wing, with the craft's body rotating around the cockpit - we would still have to care about its effects on game mechanisms. More precisely, extra speed and inability to fire. And I'm not sure that would be all. Modelwise, we would also have to make subsystems rotate where they are supposed to be.

Imperial Alliance has working s-foils that move when a certain key is pressed.  Unfortunatley we don't.

[chief1983]

I'm not sure, but Darkhill was supposed to be working with someone to get their code changes brought back into the SCP code base.  I don't know the status of this though.

[brandx0]

Imperial Alliance has working s-foils that move when a certain key is pressed.  Unfortunatley we don't.

We don't.... yet

We don't have any models with S-Foils yet either.

[TopAce]

So it's in a more advanced stage than I thought. Sounds good, but we should be careful with making such a change. Have you considered what I had said about moving subsystems and game mechanism changes?

[Herra Tohtori]

I thought b-wings could not fly in atmosphere? I mean does it look like it can?

It's a flying wing, why wouldn't it be able to fly in atmosphere?

Aside from being aerodynamically fairly viable as an airplane, there's the fact that pretty much all Star Wars vessels smaller than Star Destroyers can pretty much confortably do touchdown. Repulsorlifters FTW.

It would probably be able to fly both with the S-foils as lift surfaces, or by using them as vertical stabilizers and possibly to generate some torque to negate some aerodynamic inbalance caused by asymmetric wing (center of lift being in the different location as the center of gravity).

[chief1983]

TopAce, I have given it some thought.  It's nothing I've been too worried about implementing yet, but if the support is ever added for something like that to work easily, it would make the mod more complete.

[G0atmaster]

B-Wings, AFAIK, also have an interesting eject mechanism, if I remember correctly.  Doesn't the whole cockpit pod (the thing the wings rotate around) just seperate as an "ejection" device?

[Cyker]

Ahh, the B-Wing! My favourite ship from the X-Wing games

Just some quick randomness:

There are many schools of thought on the S-Foils:

In the FILMS, they just fly vertically ( | ), and the wings just open out when it's in attack mode so that it's a sort of cross-shape.

In the GAMES, the S-Foils in the game had the ship flat ( --- ), and when you opened them, the whole ship would rotate 90degrees with the wings opening, so it would end up in the same vertical cross shape as in the FILM.
The pilot PoV in the games varied - The S-Foil opening in the older DOS games rotated the ship around the engine block and opened the wings. Later games rotated it around the cockpit. This is because in earlier games, the turning axis all went through the engine block (More 'realistic' movement, slightly weird to control), whereas in later games they went through the cockpit (Less 'realistic' but easier to control).
The cockpit position was fixed in all the games so that whole rotating-cockpit thing only did anything during S-Foil transition

In ALL the games (IIRC!), the missiles fired from the central pod from the side inlets (Not the 8 'vents', although I'm not 100% clear as it was pretty damned hard to tell TBH


Also IIRC, the B-Wing uses 4 fusion engines, similar to an X-Wing but better, to power itself according to the in-game tech documents. It has a repulsorlift, which I assume would do most of the work keeping one aloft inside a gravity well.
Like all unmodified Starwars fighters (Aside from the ridiculously over-powered Missile Boat), the B-Wing can only hold one type of projectile ordinance, and can only fire a maximum of two at once. It can hold 16 standard Proton Torpedos in total, 8 on each side bank.
It has 3 lasers and 3 ion cannons, but there's a lot of confusion as to where they go (It varies in all the games too!). It's supposed to be highly configurable anyway (Those Verpine and their Modular parts!) so just throw in 6 gun slots or something

[aRaven]

it was portrayed so in Rebel Assault 2

[Turey]

X-Wing's case is easier because the only moving things are primary firing points and canonically you can't fire them with S-foils closed, so in fact they are only needed in one position.

X-Wing book 5, Wraith Squadron. Kell Tainer nails a TIE in a sim with the s-foils closed.

[Turambar]

and then runt gets credit for all his kills