Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: Starman01 on March 25, 2006, 06:29:20 am
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Hello,
I'm going to create my first planetary mission, but I will also make the approach towards the planet via autopilot, and chained missions with no briefing/debriefing to make the enter and departure of the atmosphere.
For the first try I created a f.... huge planet model that really works fine :) Then while I was approaching the planet with the autopilot, I was suprised to see a game feature that I didn't knew yet.
I was getting a "to close to planet, taking damage" message and I really received damage. Now, this was totally unexpected, I didn't knew there was something like that in it. :)
While this is kinda convinient, I would now like to know how this can be setup. The thing is, I already received the damage while I was very far away, and so it makes not much sense.
Can someone give me any hints regarding this issue, table-hints, special pof-entries or anything else ?
Thanks in advance
Starman©
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It's hard coded AFAIK. :v: originally planned something with planets but never finished it.
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Well, in that case that is really bad news :( Since the damage already appears at this far distance, I will not be able to create the planetary missions that I planned.
****adds another feature request to the already too long SCP wishlist****
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Just call the planet something that doesn't have the word planet in it. :)
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Um, if I named an Orion "GTD Planet", would I have similar phenomena? Like, it would cause damage to anything coming too near it? ;)
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Yep.
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Just call the planet something that doesn't have the word planet in it. :)
Ha, who would have thought that :) Thanks, now I can at least build my mission.
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Instead of calling it "planet something" call it like "system name number" (i.e.-Ribos IV).
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Um, if I named an Orion "GTD Planet", would I have similar phenomena? Like, it would cause damage to anything coming too near it? ;)
That's a bug. "Planetside Transport" shouldn't trigger gravity damage. Surely there's a better way to deal with that than a hardcoded name.
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If you were gonna have a mission actually in/on the planet, well it's easy to do if its a gas giant. Just use a nebula and say you're in a gas giant's atmosphere. As for flying over rocky planets.... I know its possible (I've see it done) but I'm not sure exactly how.......
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So...this seems interesting, for Sol: A History I'll have to change the $Name: Planet Moon in the Ships.tbl right ?, the POF name doesn't matter right?.
****adds another feature request to the already too long SCP wishlist****
It would be nice we could manage different planets in the TBL by assingning gravity field max/min lenght and intensity.
If you think about this, if the ship is supposed to be able to enter the Atmosphere, we would need to experience this damage effect, and then add the kind of shudder that the ship recieves when there is an strong Engine Wash, so it would give the impression our ship starts to vaporize slowly....
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Is this kind of gravity field calculated by the "Mass" in the POF file, then we would be able to control and modify at least Max Range, right ? (but not Min range and Intensity)
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Surely there's a better way to deal with that than a hardcoded name.
This sounds like a job for: objecttypes.tbl, once it gets fleshed out some more.
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By the way, could you add an illusion of orbiting a planet? Like, you make the planet a model that rotates, and the background starfield and nebulae are on the inside of a HUGE ball and they too rotate? This would effectively create an illusion of orbiting the planet instead of just floating there above the surface...
Of course the lighting for the planet would have to be something else than just textures. Well, it would also create a problem, I think, when the systems star is on the other side of the planet and the planet shades the fleet. Is it even possible to implement a moving star as a main source of light?
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I see no reason why you can't create the planet as a rotating subsystem of an invisible box.
Rotating the background would be more difficult though.
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The fun part is it it's got any settlements on it. Dark side would have city glows, but sun-side wouldn't. As the planet rotates, you'd want the areas passing through the terminator into night, to activate their glowmaps, but the only ways to do that is by making the model with a huge number of glowmaps, then activate them via sexp as they turn. Of course, you can't have that many maps for the model because of the HTL situation. Therein lies the problem.
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Do them as glowpoints rather than glowmaps :) Of course you'd need a hell of a lot of patience to add them all in :D
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Why the **** bother to activate/deactivate them when they pass into shadow/light?
Just make them dim enough to show up subtly in the dark side and dim enough to be flooded by the sunlight on the light side. Just as it really happens.
The city lights are not, I fear, as bright in nature as they appear on satellite photos.
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Just like I don't think nebulas are actually technicolored, but it adds to the feel of the game.
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Yeah, well, I myself would much appreciate plain starfield and perhaps the Milky Way instead of technicolor nebulae, and on some special missions some cool gas clouds in the background. Nebula missions I've always shunned a bit - there are no such regions in space that were so dense you can hardly see your wingmen.
Nor are there lightnings. But granted, if I imagine them happening instead in atmosphere of some gas giant it's much better and the missions themselves are way cool.
Monocolor nebulae I can accept, they are cool when they make the shadowed side of a ship glow on their color. :nod: But in general, I'm all for subtle effects yadda yadda yadda. Again, Frespace has always has excellent gameplay as its biggest good side - graphics used to be crappy, FSO has made them better. Still, the gameplay and the general feel has stayed much the same IMO. Why is that so, even if the graphics - including the background nebulae - have hugely improved?
Coolest thing accomplished by background nebulae is IMO environment mapping making the ships shine. It still FEELS (almost) the same when you get into the fight. The changes in gameplay only step forward in some of more special mods like TBP with it using lateral thrusters and so forth.
Sorry. I just cannot be anything other than a realism freak. :cool:
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. Is it even possible to implement a moving star as a main source of light?
You're supposed to rotate the planet, but as the Sun is a background you can't move the planet in around it. The main problem is that if you rotate the planet, once you're inside it's gravity field your ships should also rotate along the planet in a fixed or relative position to it, changing the focus on the light source, of course the system star is always in the same position. I don't think this is really possible, to have a relative and unoticeable movement as it happens in reality...
Anyways I don't really care about relative movement and gravity affecting it, it's not like I am going to play a 24 hs mission and see whoa....now is night on earth
The fun part is it it's got any settlements on it. Dark side would have city glows, but sun-side wouldn't. As the planet rotates, you'd want the areas passing through the terminator into night, to activate their glowmaps, but the only ways to do that is by making the model with a huge number of glowmaps, then activate them via sexp as they turn. Of course, you can't have that many maps for the model because of the HTL situation. Therein lies the problem.
There is a Shader that is specially used for this. However that solution would work, earth for example has 3 basic maps, the day map, and the night map and nightlights Glow map, which are supposed to be shown only over the dark face of the earth and change as the Earth rotate.
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I don't really mean making an illusion of the planet orbiting the star, merely ships orbiting planet would be highly sufficient. The change of time during a normal FS mission would not remarkably change the sun's position in relation to stars anyway, therefore we can safely ditch that option. :D
Planetary orbit illusion could be done by just making two spheres: One as the planet and one as the background, and the ships orbiting the planet in between, more or less near to the planet model. When these rotate more or less synchronously, it would very effectively seem like the ships - all of them - orbit the planet.
Of course, if the battle is on geosynchronous orbit, the earth would not rotate but instead the background sphere would rotate around the earth and around the mission area. And actually this is probably the most difficult thing to make. I'd think of fixing a star onto that background sphere model, if that is even remotely possible, so that when te background model rotates it takes the star with it, effectively causing the planet have the light side and the dark side without them being a simple texture. The ambient_factor should be remarkably low, though, to avoid foolish-looking semi-dark side of earth.
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The problem is the lightsources. They would need to rotate with the background, and that's just not possible. In reality it's geosynchronous orbit that is feasible, because in the 15 minutes of a Freespace mission the lit portion of the planet, and thus the orientation of the background, really shouldn't change all that much.
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The ambient_factor should be remarkably low, though, to avoid foolish-looking semi-dark side of earth.
This is another of the problems that I was experiment while I was updating S:AH, if you set the ambient_factor 0, then Planet's look OK, however the ships look 100% dark from the opposide to the sun. While this is realistic, it is wrong, we don't have to forget that objects reflect light, the moon as an example. (there is a longer explanation to this, and it's rendering...)
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Isn't a remote possibilty that light sources like Omni Lights could be added to the SCP. I mean, it's something common in games, right?
That way we could place the Source as a 3D object with an X,Y,Z postion, volume and intensity, even assing it to an object, almost like a sun. While it's not right to rotate a Sun around a Planet, it is easier to rotate the Sun than the whole universe around it, it would give just the same impression and we would be at speed 0 and there won't be any problems with geosynchronous orbit since it would be kind of emulated...
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The problem is the lightsources. They would need to rotate with the background, and that's just not possible.
That's what I feared. I suppose setting multiple light sources on ecliptica and activating them one by one is also not very feasible... :rolleyes:
So, another option is to say that the battles are set in some of the Lagrange points around earth. From those points both Sun and Earth stay in same position. Then, though, the rotation of Earth will not be even noticeable during a mission, and the effect will be kinda in vain. The rotation would practically only be noticed in low orbit missions where the surface of Earth (or whichever planet) sweeps below.
One possibility would be to make the earth move around the battle area. Kinda like epicentrums when people tried to explain how planets and Sun orbit around Earth, but in order to get a different effect. In LEO missions it would be usable, since 15-20 minutes is already about one fifth of the whole orbit which takes about 90 minutes when you orbit near the Earth. So, just create a ball with radius of 6400 km and make it move a circular track with radius of 6600 km and ploace the mission area in the center of this track, and place a light source somewhere far. While this solution is nowhere near ideal and does not include the apparent rotation of stars, it would create an effect very near orbiting a planet - especially when you place the mission so that the sun rises a few minutes into the mission. I know this sounds like a real chewing gum solution but it might work.
Of course you could use a smaller planet than 1:1... I don't know how FSOpen handles objects of that size. :rolleyes:
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Of course you could use a smaller planet than 1:1... I don't know how FSOpen handles objects of that size.
This is old coming from me, but:
(http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c254/Shadow0000/3DMoon02.jpg)
(http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c254/Shadow0000/3DMoon03.jpg)
Sol: A History, Luna Station (GTI Arcadia) orbiting the Moon's distance is at about 2,750,000 meters from it, the Moon model has a diamater of 3,476,000 meters (Radius 1,738,000), Mass (I don't remember now).
As you see there are no real problems with Radius 1:1 and model sizes, even Jupiter works fine, the problem is the limit of 700,000 meters of distance for Alpha 1, from it's initial point, which will make "Alpha 1 exploded for a collision with Alpha 1" (take care of not collide with yourself and die, it can happen).
What's needed to do in this case is to apply a faster limit of speed, after all is space, Inferno R1 haves the GVF Ennead which uses can match speeds of 300 m/s with the Afterburner, and there are supposed to be faster ships in R2. This is easy editing in the ships.tbl and can be done without problems...
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How many polies has your moon, and how long did it take to run it through PCS ? My 30 Km planet take about 49 seconds to compile into a poffile (having 5000 K polygons and three LODS), and this time is quite high according to my experience. I have more complex models with more polygons and textures compiled in under 20 seconds, so I first thought the planet crashed PCS
P.S. Looks really great, that's the sort of realism that make things look even greater :)
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We are playing around with planetoids a bit too and got a ~11,000 face model (four LODs and 8000 faces on first) and the compile time is around 30 seconds. Could be wrong but I don't think the actual diameter matters to much. The pof was the same size on the disk when it was 160m and when 80km. Other then the player just being so far away from the middle point of the mission. I did just try and import a 16,000 face object and PCS couldn't handle it. :(
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IMHO the best aproach for models this big would be to use Bobbau's detail box code.
What that differs from simple LODing is that LODs all change according to the distance from a central point, whereas detailboxes are being drawn when the ship enters them.
Moreover you can put further boxes inside eachother creating a seamless increase in detailing without too much stain on rendering.
Check out Omni's Death Star for reference.
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Honestly, you don't need a rotating background or lightsources to simulate an orbit. The sun does not change it's position relative to the stars for a space ship in a fast low orbit. All you need is for the planet to move around your scene at an appropriate speed for your orbit, and to have it counter rotate to always face the light source. I could do it with waypoints really. Remember, in space you're weightless. You'd feel no motion and it would seem that the planet is orbiting you. This could get obnoxous with space stations in the distance needing to be facing the right way and move too, but who sticks an arcadia in anything lower than geosynchronous orbit?
90 minutes is close to the bare minimum time for an orbit. If the average freespace mission lasts only 15, then a planet could follow a waypoint track for a quarter circle.
Also, this may be more feasable with a background projected on a modified subspace mission tube that spins really slow. But at any rate, you don't need moving light sources for a good illusion.
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Have any of you guys played Independence War 2 or Klingon Academy to get some ideas from how they approach these problems?
I War 2 has fully modeled solar systems with full 3d planets/objects/stars etc.
Klingon Academy has modeled out our Solar System and even allows you to enter planets atmospheres.
It sounds like none of ya'll have played these games - might give you some more ideas.
Does FS 2 allow you to make a lightsource such as the sun be a 3d object? If so, great - do this, and then set it far out into the system and then you can orbit the planet.
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Yaa, you can of course fly around the planets in I-War 2: EoC but gravitational interaction is not simulated, I think. In other words, you can hover on top of the planet as long as you wish, and the planets don't make ships' trajectories curves but they are in stead linear. So much of newtonian flight model... :rolleyes:
The question here is about simply making things look like all the ships would orbit the planet on more or less same orbital parametres, and the easiest way to make things look like that would be to make the planet a 3D object and make it move around the mission area (and all the ships of course). Like bfobar said it.
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How many polies has your moon, and how long did it take to run it through PCS ? My 30 Km planet take about 49 seconds to compile into a poffile (having 5000 K polygons and three LODS), and this time is quite high according to my experience. I have more complex models with more polygons and textures compiled in under 20 seconds, so I first thought the planet crashed PCS
It is has 5400 Polys (faces), a version rounder would be at 9600 Polys, however I set it to be always at LOD0, a Sphere is a Sphere and can is noticed from any distance thatn can be seen.
So, to implement other LODs, I would need to test and know, which is the distance where the planet start to be a thin point. Anyways a Sphere needs to be Anti-Aliased to be completely round, that's why I am using one with 5400 polys.
Plus other planets uses 2 or 3 sphere to make Clouds and atmospheres, so....the polycount can be a lot, even for a simple form as a sphere is....
P.S. Looks really great, that's the sort of realism that make things look even greater
That's the idea (and it looks great even without Bumpmapping for the shadows of the craters...)
Have any of you guys played Independence War 2 or Klingon Academy to get some ideas from how they approach these problems?
I War 2 has fully modeled solar systems with full 3d planets/objects/stars etc.
Klingon Academy has modeled out our Solar System and even allows you to enter planets atmospheres.
It sounds like none of ya'll have played these games - might give you some more ideas.
No, at least I don't have played those games, but I known them. The idea to of adding planets is just that, to add some matter to it, we already have the freespace so it's adding matter to give some kind of life to it...
Does FS 2 allow you to make a lightsource such as the sun be a 3d object? If so, great - do this, and then set it far out into the system and then you can orbit the planet.
No, actually impossible. There is no way of set a 3D light source, only the ones that can be used on the background, kind of 2D light sources.
Yaa, you can of course fly around the planets in I-War 2: EoC but gravitational interaction is not simulated, I think. In other words, you can hover on top of the planet as long as you wish, and the planets don't make ships' trajectories curves but they are in stead linear. So much of newtonian flight model...
The question here is about simply making things look like all the ships would orbit the planet on more or less same orbital parametres, and the easiest way to make things look like that would be to make the planet a 3D object and make it move around the mission area (and all the ships of course). Like bfobar said it.
Well, the somethings can be probabily simulated, for example entering in the planet's atmosphere can be made with the actual damage that models named "planets" do, and add a Shudder effect like the engine wash cause, so it gives the impression the Ship is begin burn by gravity, speed, and friction. What we would need is if we could set something like what happens with Missiles:
When you add a Weapon either Primary (laser mostly) or Secondary (Missile mostly), with a Negative Mass:, ex: Mass: -7,000,000. The effect made to the ships affected is the opposite, in exchange of us being hit away by the force of the explosion, we are being sucked in to the center of the explosion, like a Dark Hole.
Maybe if someone can do something with a really big Range of explosion, and the exact negative Mass, we could set a FirePoint into the Center of the Planet, and make and Invisible explosion, and tell the planet to lauch that Missile with a Speed of 0, that means it generates and explodes in the center of it, and start attracting everything to it.
The problem is that I don't remember how really was the Range setting for Missiles, right now...I'll try this it works for weapons of gravity kind, so it should work like gravity for planet's, if we make an invisible missile with also invisible effects, the effect and explosion should be constant, probabiliy 1 second would be enough for our ship to be moving with no stopping...(an infinite chain of "Child" Missiles should work...)
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[off]Singularity Bomb, anyone?[/off]
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What about the "Affected by Gravity" option in FRED? Never used it myself but.......
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You know, I'm having a hard time buying that a 3d object can not be a lightsource for a system in FS 2. I think the answer to your dilemma would still be to make a 3d Sun, have there be no sun in the 2d background emitting light (so it would essentially be darkness), and have the 3d sun object emitting light at a great intensity.
Your energy weapons fired by ships put off light - I'm sure there are values that adjust for range of visible effect, brightness and intensity. I'm sure if you just modified these values, you could then have a light emitting 3d sun.
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[off]Singularity Bomb, anyone?[/off]
I don't want to test this, actually the Bomb would be faking "positive" Gravity, with "Negative" inertia. That's maybe seen as the same in effect, however Mass calculation is wrong, so I won't really test this.
What about the "Affected by Gravity" option in FRED? Never used it myself but.......
I am not too sure and probabily wrong, but I think this was kind of directional Gravity for Planar Landscapes, was Blackwater Operations. The problem is that why can assing Gravity to any object, like a Planet, which is wrong...
All objects should have a Gravity field calculated, the POFs have a MASS factor which can be specified, so this an additional calculation which could be compatibility with the actual state of POFs.
Again, I should prefer to select which object has gravity (planets/moons) in order to not cause a stream of calculations for every simple Mass factor, and every single ship.
You know, I'm having a hard time buying that a 3d object can not be a lightsource for a system in FS 2. I think the answer to your dilemma would still be to make a 3d Sun, have there be no sun in the 2d background emitting light (so it would essentially be darkness), and have the 3d sun object emitting light at a great intensity.
Yes, it should be a 3D lightsource, which almost no model, after all you can't really see it...
Your energy weapons fired by ships put off light - I'm sure there are values that adjust for range of visible effect, brightness and intensity. I'm sure if you just modified these values, you could then have a light emitting 3d sun.
This could work, but it would increase the lightning factor for every single Weapon, and will end being a bad idea, there was no way of making a specfic choice...