Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => The Babylon Project => Topic started by: rcrph on April 11, 2006, 07:49:27 pm
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Has anything been done with regards to a pilot ejecting a fighter. It would be nice to even have a static pilot model that could be rescued. Any thoughts ??
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MAG told something of bringing a model of guy in atmosphere-suit...
but he has been helluva busy lately..
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I've wanted to do that for years but I'm rubbish at modelling people. I had this idea of a guy in a jetpack armed with a couple of piddly mini subachs for FS2. I wanted to make his limbs destroyable subobjects and use a nice gooey red texture for his innards ;7
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What about the alternative to eject the whole cockpit area.?! Think thats much more realistic (like seen in space - above and beynd)
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Fine if you want every single Star Fury to carry around a docked ejector seat pod stuck to it. Oh yes, you'd have to manually dock them in fred too ;). Nice idea. Not going to work in the real world. Sorry dude.
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You can spawn the ejected cockpit when a starflurry goes bye-bye. If only someone would actually model the cockpit first...
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That's not really ejecting though is it. That's just getting blown up :D
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Actually, if the player ejects, it'd be better to use change-ship-class, changint the player's craft to the ejected cockpit and restoring integrity, then spawning the player's former craft right behind it with no AI, and self-destructing it. The player's escape pod might then have to wait around for a shuttle to dock with and recover it, assuming you're not in the thick of battle with an enemy that hates your kind with a vengance and destroys escape pods.
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Yeah, ejection pods are nice, but just a model of a pilot in an atmospheric suit would be suitable. You could have the pilot just appear at a certain distance from a destroyed fighter. It would be especially cool to have different textures on the pilot model for different races. OK, who's a model maker out there?
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I modelled the space dude, I was primarily going to use it in the thirdspace missions. Would work with ejecting, but a cockpit would be better. Only take 5 mins to model a star fury cockpit, bit if we did it for the star fury poeple would expect it for other races fighters wouldnt they. I think it would work well eg. When player ship hull is less than say 8 percent, the cockpit would replaxce the player ship and a new ships would arrive say 100 m behind the player. Then destruct the ships say 4 seconds after and voilla. Virtual ejection, or is ejaculation ? lol
Have to agree with triv on that one :)
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Wow. Between this and engines on B4, we're snowed under with crazy-ass ideas at the moment :).
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I modelled the space dude, I was primarily going to use it in the thirdspace missions. Would work with ejecting, but a cockpit would be better. Only take 5 mins to model a star fury cockpit, bit if we did it for the star fury poeple would expect it for other races fighters wouldnt they. I think it would work well eg. When player ship hull is less than say 8 percent, the cockpit would replaxce the player ship and a new ships would arrive say 100 m behind the player. Then destruct the ships say 4 seconds after and voilla.
You'll have a real problem getting the new ship to appear behind the escape pod with the correct orientation most likely. Get and set rotation SEXPs are on my list but they're quite far down.
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Prob why the change ship class was suggested.
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Yeah but even if you use explosion effect as well you're not going to be able to generate the starfury debris correctly. It will always look like a fudge until you can set the orientation of the fury correctly.
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That's what I was thinking. I just couldn't be bothered to say it ;).
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Who the hell is going to care jack **** about the undetectable little pieces if fuselage flying in space? This is how it should be done; Change player ship to cockpit, and create an explosion behind the cockpit (just couple of meters behind) with no damage. This way we get the blast indicator on the HUD, possibly rattle the cockpit around a bit.
That should be close enought for ejection. Because when you are stuck with the cockpit model, the last thing in your mind will be worries about the pieces of your fighter. Really.
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Maybe you could set the hull (sans ejector) to be a subobject replete with live debris and work that way, disarming and perhaps disabling the ship when it is destroyed?
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Who the hell is going to care jack **** about the undetectable little pieces if fuselage flying in space?
Cause even with an explosion effect you're going to notice the body of other starfuries suddenly vanish unless you make the effect disproportionately large. You might not notice it on your own fighter but it will be bloody obvious the second you try doing it to your wingmen.
What's interesting though is it appears as if the get-object-x SEXPs have been upgraded at some point. Looks like they can now do get and set spacial orientation. Which means you can spawn a ship and get the right orientation :)
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Cause even with an explosion effect you're going to notice the body of other starfuries suddenly vanish unless you make the effect disproportionately large.
Oh yeah those others :nervous: Well no ejecting cockpits for them! Better to teach them to fly.
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Bah...
Make one debris piece that is the cockpit and code in that sometimes it appears and sometimes it doesn't.
Really, it doesn't matter that much. It doesn't need to be a real ship even. Just a piece of debris shaped as the cockpit section would do for me. I bet it wouldn't be impossible. Though again that bet is gained through Stetson-Harrison method...
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A brilliant suggestion with one major flaw. The player ejects but is still killed when his ship blows up regardless of whether he successfully ejects or not :p
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If you want the player to eject, then use my idea.
If you want to see wingmates eject, then use Tohtoris idea.
Gee, look at that. Finns saved the day again with their superiour intellect. :p
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Except that now you need two copies of the starfury model or when the player ejects you have the possibility of seeing another cockpit shoot past you.
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Except that now you need two copies of the starfury model or when the player ejects you have the possibility of seeing another cockpit shoot past you.
No. Because my idea includes the changeling the player schip to the jävliga escape cockpod. Thus there is not exploding starflurry when the player ejects, just the SEXPlosion. Get it?
We just need the remodelled aurora with the cockpit debris. And the cockpit model to be used if player ever want's to eject...
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A brilliant suggestion with one major flaw. The player ejects but is still killed when his ship blows up regardless of whether he successfully ejects or not :p
You're only killed because the text appearing in the screen says so. If that's not hardcoded i suppose it could be rathereasily altered to say that the player has safely ejected.
A more sophisticated system: Player can trigger a self-destruct sequence before being actually killed; in this occasion there appears a piece of debris that looks like the cockpit. And on this occasion the text on the screen could say "Alpha One was safely ejected and now waits for rescue along with all the other trash from battle" or something along those lines.
If the player ship is actually destroyed, then the message says the old crap "Alpha 1 was killed by beam barrage from Sathanasi No. 1,7,8, 34 and 67" thingy.
AI pilots could randomly be able to eject upon actual destruction - we don't actually want randomly self-destructing wingmates, it feels thye are doing it already so increasing the effect would be unfeasable. Their discretion cannot be trusted...
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Yet another brilliant suggestion, but would require support from the SCP department.
AND there is little difference if the player died or ejected, since it still requires restarting the mission (this point was presented once before when this issue was debated, and is not my idea nor opinion). What we need is a solution for a situation when the story requires player to eject. All other ejections are less significant and make little difference. So any simple solution should suffice on those cases (I like the debris idea).
Player ejections can be made happen via cunning FREDing, so we should be covered. Exept for the cockpit model itself.
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I will do the star fury cockpit this weekend then give it to mav to texture :)
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You know, you could just pof->cob the Aurora and seperate the cockpit polygons, with the existing texturing. All you'd have to do is solidify it and add geometry to the back.
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I was thinking about doing a new model for the cockpit, as this would be very low poly I can up the poly count a bit and make it look a lot better, probably even with a little pilot in :)
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And what would that look like next to the old Starfury? Oh well looks like you have to redo the Starfury too. :drevil:
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You know, most people would be happy they'd got the team to agree to one silly practically unworkable idea. :mad:
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What? :nervous:
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mmm :eek2:
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Hmmm, I've been waiting to see what people could do in trying to make a "high def" Aurora, similar to what the community is doing with the Perseus, Herc II, and other FS2 fighters. This could be interesting. :)
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Great. Another inductee into the "I want to see a render model slide show" brigade.
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I certainly wouldn't mind seeing what the artists can do. :yes:
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It is not the time yet. We don't even have all the canon ships ingame.
(cottoncottoncotton)
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I think people misunderstand, I don't mean I have to see it in-game. I'm just curious what people's renditions of a higher poly Aurora and other TBP ships might look like. That's all. :rolleyes:
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It is not the time yet.
Yes, it's a waste of the team's time when there are other more important things to do. Not that it's ever time to put inappropriately high poly ships into a game, and I'm sick of people asking for it. I often wish someone (with time to waste) would just make an ultra high poly mod of TBP. It would prove to everyone once and for all that a pretty but jerkily scrolling B5 shoot-em-up that can shift 20 or so ships isn't as much fun as what we already have.
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I'm just happy with anything that TBP folks do. I'm sure that there's a multitude of possibilities to implement ejection. And I'm sure that they will select a method when they have the time. (applause) :yes:
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Indeed.
IMO the Aurora, for example, already looks as good as it does in the series (which has quite crappy CGI, actually :D - strange how your criteria for good CGI change by years...)
One never gets close enough to admire all the high-poly goodness in combat. Of course it would be nice to see transparent cockpits on Starfuries but you can count me to be one of those who'd love to see all the ships before having über-super-duper-cool versions of existing craft.
(read: give me teh Vorlon Dreadnought and ISA Victory with Main Beam weaponry ASAP! :p)
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Yeah, maybe the Aurora can become the new Nial. ;)