Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: Tolwyn on June 21, 2003, 03:36:40 am
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I've noticed that if you have cap ships shields (like in my pet project Wing Commander Saga), that there is a limit for shields hits and afterwards the game crashes. Is there any way to fix this?
Besides that, only the current latestrelease.exe works with with cap ships shields correctly. Older releases including fs_open3_5 show the shield animation not corect, as if the shield would have about 400 and not 4k polys. Fix, please.
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Originally posted by Tolwyn
I've noticed that if you have cap ships shields (like in my pet project Wing Commander Saga), that there is a limit for shields hits and afterwards the game crashes. Is there any way to fix this?
Besides that, only the current latestrelease.exe works with with cap ships shields correctly. Older releases including fs_open3_5 show the shield animation not corect, as if the shield would have about 400 and not 4k polys. Fix, please.
I use FS2_Open and never have this bug with the FSPort's Lucifer shields, but I do get an odd over sized shield hit ani it looks funny but it's hard on the eyes.
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Originally posted by StarGunner
I use FS2_Open and never have this bug with the FSPort's Lucifer shields, but I do get an odd over sized shield hit ani it looks funny but it's hard on the eyes.
Thats because the shield is low-poly. If you had a shield with a higher poly count you would also see smaller shield hits.
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Jup the polycount for Capship shields has to be quite high...working with 4000polys for a shield is a good thing. Still have problems when you are using a ship shaped shield, but it looks quite cool.
The Vesuvius with its shield is realy an eyecandy when in heavy battle.
TSC Vesuvius from Wing Commander 4 for everyone who dosn't know what ship I am talking about.
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there is no cap for shield pollys
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Originally posted by StarGunner
I use FS2_Open and never have this bug with the FSPort's Lucifer shields, but I do get an odd over sized shield hit ani it looks funny but it's hard on the eyes.
it is not just that. fs_open seems to have problems with shield hit animation, except the latestrelease.exe, so you get an oversizedeffect and that even if the shield mesh has 4000 polys.
Still, I'm not sure what may cause the game crash. Any ideas?
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may this cause the game crash?
Do you mean shield hits in total or shield hits at the same time? I'm not really a table guy, but I found that defining the ship as a bomber or other shielded ship type tended to help. I suppose the problem might be being caused by the shield power being too high or the like, other than that, I'm afraid I'm out of ideas.
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Well...making the Vesuvius a bomber will make the game crash. That is certain.
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well, it doesn't crash direct... but if I have more than 4 ships in a battle the game will certanly crash... with 4 or less after a certan ammount of time
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suggestions?
That might be the problem, I certainly found I had problems with very powerful shields I find that capital ships have a hell of a lot of power to charge shields with anyway, so the best bet is to give them moderately weak shields, which can absorb, for example, the main impact of a heavy bomb or the like but need to recharge afterwards, but which tend to fail under combined fire, that way it gives the ship a weakness despite the shields.
Of course, this technique may not tie in with what you are trying to do
Flipside .
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for a ship the size of the lucifer you would need a shield mesh on the order of 40,000 pollies
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I disagree for a ship of the size of the Vesuvius a 4-5k mesh is sufficient...
and besides, I would like to know why the game crashes...
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Originally posted by Tolwyn
and besides, I would like to know why the game crashes...
what would you expect from a ship called vesuvius?:lol:
btw you guys already know what i think about shields for capships, maybe something good will come from the decal code, let's see:)
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is it possible that the shield verticles limit is the reason for the game crash? I'm quite sure that my shields exceed this limit (1600)
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I will not claim to have understood what has happened.
I only think that your best source of information on that subject is the TBP team. Why? Well, because if you come to think at the time they took incorporating all those ships on TBP, well they should know what works, and what doesn't. How to fix it then, should be easier. My gut feeling has to do with the amount of faces in the shield, AKA when they are lower, the game should be more stable, but then that is all I can think, right now.
I am watching this project and honing my skills to help as a Freder. Good luck with the ships.
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It looks like that FS2 has a general problem with powerful shields. The easiest solution would be to have cap ships without shields making the game running more stable (shields render every bug testing useless) until TSP implements support ofr cap ships shields.
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So, for vol. 1 just make the ships tough, without them needing shields. Besides, If I recall correctly there seems to be a problem concerning ships and shields and paths (for docking - undocking) meaning that you couldn't have all of them, unless you got really creative.
Another thing that sprang to mind. Use the new fred instructions so that when a ship is close to its mothership (the distance_from_subsystem sexp), a landing sequence (avi or something) is played. (different one for each ship)
With the SCP, we can make FS2 more WC than ORIGIN ever could!
I really hope that you elect to use the SCP version of FRED. (Ok, it has got teething problems but so much potential!)
Best of luck with the ships.
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Originally posted by StarGunner
I use FS2_Open and never have this bug with the FSPort's Lucifer shields, but I do get an odd over sized shield hit ani it looks funny but it's hard on the eyes.
I do. Whenever a mission with a shielded Lucy loads, an illegal operation occurs in DDHELP.EXE and I have to reboot my computer before running FS2 again. Grrrr, I'll never get past Playing Judas at this rate. It was irritating enough when it didn't crash your computer while the mission was loading.:hopping:
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hmm...is there some kind of shieldhit buffer? From my experiences with things like this in other games (the out of sfx_t error in sven coop for half life...the game crashes when there are more than 512 different sounds in the sound buffer) it seems like there might be something like this, and it normally doesn't happen on fighters/bombers because there isn't as many things impacting the shield at once, but a cap ship has a good deal more things hitting it, so this might overwrite something, thus causing an access violation...just my 2c
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The same problem happened when I used the Unholy Alliance mod by Kazzan, after so many hits the game would crash..
Found a cure, that worked for me, but I had to remove these entries from the hud table (IconAeolus.ani, IconMentu.ani and IconSobek.ani) after that it quit crashing..
(edit) Hope this helps track the bug.:)
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Must be a prob with the shield ani because the shielded SSD Diablo works fine in game.
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topic bumped to reflect issue status (ticket posted in internal)
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Originally posted by KARMA
what would you expect from a ship called vesuvius?:lol:
btw you guys already know what i think about shields for capships, maybe something good will come from the decal code, let's see:)
And the Star Wars Conversion would need it. Seriously :)
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_argv[-1] made capship-shields...... not a real model, but the capship acts like it has them...and they are singular too!:D
Gotta get my hand on that!
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Well I would have an idea for capship shields without the models, but it would need quite some work from the coding people.
I thing something like this should be in the codec:
if cap-ship-shield on -> show shield-ani -> damage shield
if capshipshield off -> show hit-ani -> damage hull
Don't know if that is possible...in theorie it should work.
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Originally posted by TrashMan
_argv[-1] made capship-shields...... not a real model, but the capship acts like it has them...and they are singular too!:D
Gotta get my hand on that!
interesting... could you explain how to do that?
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if cap-ship-shield on -> show shield-ani -> damage shield
if capshipshield off -> show hit-ani -> damage hull
I posted something like this ages ago, but now it isn't necessary since non modelled capship's shields have been already implemented, althought it is something that still needs some work: there isn't any shield hit effect
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Originally posted by KARMA
I posted something like this ages ago, but now it isn't necessary since non modelled capship's shields have been already implemented, althought it is something that still needs some work: there isn't any shield hit effect
is it implemented in the latest release? Does this mean that I only have to add shieldhitpoints to the cap ship tbl entry?
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Originally posted by KARMA
I posted something like this ages ago, but now it isn't necessary since non modelled capship's shields have been already implemented, althought it is something that still needs some work: there isn't any shield hit effect
If that is allready implemented how can we get it to work?
What has to be done to get an shieldanimation in there?
Please tell me/us more details about that.
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http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,17067.0.html a bit long thread
animations work only if there are some polys where to draw them, and for reasons too long to explain (assuming I would be able to:doubt: ) those polys can't be the hull's polys, therefore you can't have -so far- shield animations without a shield mesh. I asked for example for a "glow" effect:doubt:, something like this http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,17672.0.html , wich would be better than nothing in my opinion, but better to leave it to the coders:)
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bobboau says the crashing is caused by the shield mesh not being dense enough
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has he seen my current shield mesh I sent you? 'cause this might explain our problems...
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Originally posted by Tolwyn
interesting... could you explain how to do that?
Ask _argv[-1]. He made a thread about it not long ago...just look for it!
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let's just have the shield hit effect appear on the hull when it gets hit. it'll be so much simpler.
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i'm with carl
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actualy I said the bad rendering was from the loose sheild, and I agree with that sugestion, but am too busy to implement it now
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well if you can do that, it would surely be WELL accepted, I just thought it wasn't possible (from what you guys said ages ago) without killing performances due to the problem of finding the neighbor polys.
Nonetheless I still think it wouldn't be the best solution possible: it would be hard to have control over the size of the effect, since not all the polys of an hull mesh are of the same size and often they would be too big for a realistic effect.
I'd like more for example an effect based on something like the decal code or a glow effect like in homeworld.
Talking about the SW conversion, in the films when a laser hit a ship with shields, you can see small explosions little far from the hull, when there aren't shields the explosions are bigger and are on the hull surface. Would something like this possible/useful to realize?
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a shield tri consists of
3 indexes into a vertex array - defining the shield poly
3 indexes into the shield poly array, defining neighbors
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I suppose one option is to have the shield 'object' as the first LOD of the model (Not sure if this could include sub-objects) increased in size by, say, 7.5%? That way, shield hits really would crawl over the surface of your ship?
Flipside :D
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the bsp structure of the hull is about as diferent as you can get from the structure the shields are held in
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This could poss be done at the Mod creation level, simply creating the shield model using a copy of the Main LOD, but with the UV's deleted? LOL You've already eased the pain of Thrusters Bobb, I wouldn't ask for more ;)
Flipside :D
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obviously it has been already tryed, and althought somehow possible, there are many probs
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I wuld sugest subdivideing the geometry, quite a bit, for caps ships especaly, and useing the equivilant of a grow modifier on it to make it just a little bit off of the surface.
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personally I use only truespace, and if you just scale up the mesh, many parts goes offset from the correspondent parts of the hull (venom said there is a tool in max that can deal with this prob, I never found something similar in TS)
What you have to do is to scale all the parts individually, and you have also to subdivide the mesh to 20/40k polys and import the shield mesh from another pof at the end of editing (or you can't use modelview)... the whole thing is a bit annoying, personally I prefer to use argv's virtual shields 'till a solution will be found, in one way or the other
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Yep, it would be great if the Damage decals ever get revised and hopefully repaired as well :)
I think the main problem with enlarging some models for shields is when two polygons are facing each other and tend to cross over each other, this is why it would be difficult to do with subsystems, though a boolean Unify would probably fix this. Alas because of the way the ships are stored, and the way the shields seem to be animated, this will be about the best we can hope for if the same shield system is used for Capships as Fighters :) Unless someone is going to do something ingenious with the Bounding boxes or the like :D
Flipside :D