Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => Fate of the Galaxy => Topic started by: chief1983 on January 31, 2007, 02:57:01 am
-
I was looking at our current model for the B-Wing with a friend of mine, and he pointed out that the missile hardpoints were terribly wrong, as they appeared to be coming out of the engine area. I happen to agree that this is what appears to be happening, and that they need to be properly placed. So, I've edited the POF file. Now, on a B-Wing, the two secondary hardpoints are very far from each other. This could create an odd situation for the pilot. So, I want to ask everyone's opinion on both the accuracy and playability of the two designs. There is an image of them below.
http://swc.fs2downloads.com/media/screenshots/Fighters-Rebel/B-Wing/bwing-oldhardpoints.jpg (http://swc.fs2downloads.com/media/screenshots/Fighters-Rebel/B-Wing/bwing-oldhardpoints.jpg)
http://swc.fs2downloads.com/media/screenshots/Fighters-Rebel/B-Wing/bwing-newhardpoints.jpg (http://swc.fs2downloads.com/media/screenshots/Fighters-Rebel/B-Wing/bwing-newhardpoints.jpg)
If they're both wrong and the secondary hardpoints go somewhere else entirely please let me know on that as well.
edit: DOH! fixed the links.
-
Perhaps you should link to JPG's instead of the PNG's.
Are you sure that the wingtip missile launcher even exists? AFAIK the B-Wing has proton torpedo launchers on top of the engine block, right where the above hardpoint is now. In my opinion there's no valid reason for the other hardpoint to exist. Just make the above one a dual launcher. SW fighters only usually carry one type of ordnance anyway, so there's no need for two slots.
-
the 2nd launcher is in the pod at the end of the middle wing, right next to the heavy laser cannon. XWAU has it right
btw: i can't see anything on the 2nd pic.
-
Try again. For some reason I linked to the thumbnails instead of the images themselves. If aRaven is right, then I believe that's where I put the second launcher, besides the one above the engine area. There were two similar extrusions on the model, small round holes I guess, one above the engine area, and an identical one at the end of that middle wing. That's where I moved the two missile hardpoints to.
-
if you look at mine in the other thread the missile tubes are those tubes that on your model are attached to the side of the fuselage, they should be full cylinders and not attached halfway into the mesh.
-
You mean something like this?
http://swc.fs2downloads.com/media/screenshots/Fighters-Rebel/B-Wing/bwing-hardpointsv3.jpg (http://swc.fs2downloads.com/media/screenshots/Fighters-Rebel/B-Wing/bwing-hardpointsv3.jpg)
If that's the case, what are those openings for between those two tubes and at the end of the middle wing? Does anyone have a reference for this? I can't seem to turn much up so far.
-
theyre just heavy cannons, while the cannons on the nose of the cockpit are ion cannons but one of the wing cannons on the middle wing might be a ion cannon.
-
To me, the torpedo launcher are placed in the 8 holes. I think it make sense for a bomber.
-
Blurry blueprints (http://krantas.mvhosted.com/images/Image_databank/fighter/BWingBlueprint.jpg)
Dunno where that's ripped, but there you go - at least some reference. :rolleyes:
Edit: Delete ? from link to eliminate leech error after clicking on link -Chief
-
So I was totally wrong :blah:
-
If I'm looking at that right, then my revision of the B-Wing, with one below the cockpit and one at the base of the wing, between the cannons, is correct. It looks like the Primary launcher is pointing to that spot between the ion and blaster cannons. This image also makes the pods appear to be more embedded into the fighter, and not completely separated. I guess this is just another example of conflicting Star Wars sources. The New Essential Guide appears to back up all of minilogo's claims of the pod area being the only missile launcher area on the ship, although it does not clearly point out that the pods themselves are the launchers. I believe I will stick with the second revision then, unless someone has a better reference than the last one that proves it wrong.
-
So I was totally wrong :blah:
Actually our original B-Wing had them there, but I was informed that those are part of the engine system itself. On a plane that makes sense, to have an intake, but on a spaceship, I'm wondering what sort of intakes ships need like that. Anyone versed in Star Wars Technobabble that can explain what the engine intakes on fighters intake/collect? Are those purely for atmospheric flight, or what?
-
While I'm no expert, I would suppose they function in a similar way to the X-Wing's intakes, whatever they do, which is most likely for atmospheric use.
-
SW ships use ion engines, so all they need is a good powersource and minimal propellant.
Therefore any powerfull "engine" would be 80% powergenerator --> heat --> heat sinks.
Why have them foreward? That way anyone can see them.....but so can you see the guy, and pepper 'em with your guns. Out of all the problems, I think being the most visible from the angle where I'm the most dangerous isn't such a bad trade-off.
Having them point backwards may be problematic as the ion stream from the engines could reflect the heat onto you.
-
Bear in mind that Star Wars is a pseudo-techno-universe. A device does what writers want it to do, they don't try to explain it.
Heat sinks themselves would be next to useless in a space ship. Sure, they do absorb heat but they also weigh a lot and when they start to melt they're not going to do any good to the ship. They are needed to equalize the spikes in energy output and store heat energy to be dissipated later.
What a space ship (and a computer!) needs is means to get rid of exess temperature. In fact, a space ship must always pump equivalent amount of heat into space as is generated in various components, in order to avoid overheating and melting. To do that in space there's two options:
Method 1: Ejecting heated matter into space, ie. transferring heat energy by matter transfer. The most sensible way to do this would be ising fuel as heat sink and ejecting the heated fuel. This method was, and probably still is, in fact used in booster rocket engines such as Saturn 5's F1-engines: to avoid the exhaust nozzles and combustion chambers melting, they pumped the cold fuel through pipes circulating the exhaust and combustion chamber before leading it into chamber and ignited. That way the exhaust gas takes away exess heat from the actual burning process and keeps the engine intact. The fuel heatsink was also utilized by SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance fighter.
Pros: good heat transfer power capacity for a limited time.
Cons: limited ejecta (fuel) supply equals limited useful time for the ship. Obviously it doesn't matter if the main engine is the main heat producer - you run out of fuel, you don't need the heat sink as much any more.
Method 2: Losing thermal energy via radiation, ie. radiating energy to space. Obvious advantage is that it doesn't need to eject any matter into space, so it has unlimited running time as long as fluid circulates in pipes going through the heat source and the pipes. Almost as obvious disadvangtage is that it requires a lot of surface area to get rid of substantiable amounts of thermal energy. Also there's a problem if there happens to be an external light source like, say, a star nearby that can actually pump energy into radiators - in which case a cooler becomes a
heater and doesn't really do any good... :rolleyes:
Computers, cars and airplanes are able to use the most efficient method of cooling because there's a practically limitless heatsink - atmosphere - available for applications such as combustion engines or electrical devices. They can transfer the heat into air, then pump the air out of system and then pump back cooler air to fill the void. Water cooling uses same method but it uses water instead of air as the primary heat transfer matter - but every water cooling system has an air-cooled heat exchanger that transfers water's thermal energy into air. So it's air cooling with a twist.
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. It's possible to do with sufficient energy source such as petroleoum, lasers or intense nuclear generator heat.
...Or, they are just there to look cool. :p
-
...Or, they are just there to look cool. :p
I think you're on to something.
-
LOL
Umm, as far as one ordinance=one missile bay, whatever happened to linked fire? We need 2 torp bays!
Anyway, about the B-Wing itself. How do the mechanics of it work? I mean, according to Star Wars, the cockpit is always, I guess, "level," at least on the horizontal axis, while the ship spins around it. How is this gonna work in game? does the pilot get a sensation of rolling when they're supposed to roll? Or ingame, will the ship in fact spin around the ship like it's supposed to?
-
Umm, as far as one ordinance=one missile bay, whatever happened to linked fire? We need 2 torp bays!
Where is there an example with only one? All the revisions I've shown have two.
Anyway, about the B-Wing itself. How do the mechanics of it work? I mean, according to Star Wars, the cockpit is always, I guess, "level," at least on the horizontal axis, while the ship spins around it. How is this gonna work in game? does the pilot get a sensation of rolling when they're supposed to roll? Or ingame, will the ship in fact spin around the ship like it's supposed to?
That's something I've been discussing lately. I don't know how much the engine currently supports that level of model animation. I would intend for the ship to rotate around the cockpit, that it always stays level, as far as the pilot is concerned. So not only does the main body of the fighter have to be able to rotate around the cockpit, its smaller wings need to be able to open up as well. For now though, we're just going with static models. B-Wing and X-Wing animation are something I hope to see someday though. Currently those two ships are not broken into submodels, so I'm assuming that would need to be done before any sort of animation could happen.
-
AFAIK it should be entirely possible to make the wings open and close. While making the model able to rotate should be easy, actually making it do it dynamically ingame is something that I wouldn't want to touch with a 10-foot pole.
-
you dont have to break models down to animate them, all you have to do is give them a skeletal hierarchy with deformers and weigh the mesh to the skeleton, as long as the engine supports vertex weights then you can do this, i do it all the time for other games.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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).
-
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.
-
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?
-
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 ;)
-
it was portrayed so in Rebel Assault 2
-
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.
-
and then runt gets credit for all his kills
-
lol yeah. Apparently, it's harder to aim with the wings at the wrong angle, but no matter where they are, you can still shoot. I forgot about that.