Hard Light Productions Forums
Community Projects => The FreeSpace Upgrade Project => Topic started by: Grizzly on May 26, 2008, 03:03:27 am
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I am very intrested in the HTL'ing of the Serapis, the Vesudan Advanced Interceptor which happens to be my favorite fighter (Because it resembles the Mitshubishu A6M5 Zero, the fragile but extremely agile and deadly Japanese WOII fighter).
So... Could someone fill me in on the progress?
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Err, well Taristin HTLed it ages ago - it's been in the MVPs ever since. ;)
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It's borderline unusable due to clipping errors, though.
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I never noticed any problems with shooting down Serapis fighter except for the one in Procyon Insurgency.
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I tried fighting a wing of them earlier and could barely manage to bring one's shields down. Nine out of ten shots just passed straight through it.
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Well I'll look into it then. We don't (well.....err, usually :nervous:) make a whole new model because an existing one has clipping errors. :p
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The Aten?
And my Serapis is fine.
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The Serapis model is particularly bad with this, enough to have a significant impact on the balance and difficulty of some missions. It has caused me to waste a lot of time in the past trying to figure out why some of my missions behaved differently at times than they usually do.
I never noticed any problems with shooting down Serapis fighter except for the one in Procyon Insurgency.
That one is identical to the normal media VP model, just with different textures. I removed it from the campaign when I found out what was going on.
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This is kinda concerning then - I extensively tested all possible HTLed ships for collision errors months ago and fixed the ones that issues appeared on. The Serapis was among those I tested, but I found absolutely no evidence of any problems with ramming and shooting from all angles.
If I've managed to miss an issue as large as the ones reported here on the Serapis, it makes me wonder what else might have slipped through.
From FSU internal, this is the list I've been keeping of collision errors. Has anyone experienced errors with the crossed out ships on the 'possibly broken' section other than the Serapis? We need to smite these errors for the next release.
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List of broken ships:
Aten (Rebuild completed)
Apollo (Not looked into this yet, but it's reported in the main forum thread that it's ghosting)
Hecate (Fixed in "FixedPofs1.0)
Faustus (Fixed in "FixedPofs1.0)
Sobek (Fixed in "FixedPofs1.0)
Dis (Fixed in "FixedPofs1.0)
SAC3 (Fixed in "FixedPofs1.0)
Zephyrus Not worth the huge effort involved in fixing for now. :(
List of possibly broken ships: (ie, stuff that was converted with the pof exporter. Most I think are fine, but I'll check them out.)
Ursa
Pegassus (Slight ghosting on the tip of the nose but otherwise ok)
Amazon
Satis
Anuket
Mara
Ares
Erinyes
Perseus
Mjolnir
Serapis
Medusa
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Hmm. Given the problems I've been encountering recently (that have nothing to do with specific models) I think the issues may be code-based. As more and more high-poly ships are being used, I think it's the engine itself that's not calculating things properly.
We should run some tests... my hypothesis is that with only a few ships in a mission everything will work fine, but with five or six wings of high-poly fighters, half a dozen high-poly freighters, and three or four high-poly capships (such that the polycount of all ships in a single mission exceeds 100k) there could be problems.
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Well now. Looks like the Freespace engine is finally feeling itself under the SCP's heel :P
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From FSU internal, this is the list I've been keeping of collision errors. Has anyone experienced errors with the crossed out ships on the 'possibly broken' section other than the Serapis? We need to smite these errors for the next release.
I have noticed some holes on the Satis (in the fifth mission of PI, for example), although they aren't quite as severe as on some of the other ships.
This is all on the 3.6.9 VPs by the way. I haven't tested the 3.6.10 set much, if any models have been changed in that.
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Thank God. The Aten is fixed!
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Uhh. No. The Aten is still a ghost ship, as is the Sobek. (partially.)
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Apparently il y a un new version in the works.
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Uhh. No. The Aten is still a ghost ship, as is the Sobek. (partially.)
Never had problems with the Sobek. Anyway...
D'accord.
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Damn French Canadiens :rolleyes:
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Thank God. The Aten is fixed!
Well.....not so much it seems. The new model has no collision mesh errors, but it seems to have somehow developed the ability to cripple the rendering of weapon effects, weapon impact effects and particle spews, but all only when it is on the right hand side of the players screen! Rotate it to be on the left and all works as it should. I have never seen anything like it. :\
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Mantis?
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It's definitely a problem with that particular POF, rather than the engine - using the old Aten model gets rid of all the effect rendering issues (but reintroduces the totally fly-through model problems obviously).
Really this kind of effect rendering problem shouldn't be physically possible to get from a POF, yet that's what's happening plain as day.
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Is this the Aten in 3.6.10 beta MVPs? If so, I don't (seem to) have problems with it...nor with the Sobek.
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The crappy one is. I never had problems with the Sobek.
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No this is an all new model that I built after the betas were released - it will come out when the final MVPs are released. It has already won the weirdest bug ever award though. :\
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I never noticed any issues with the Hecate, Dis, SAC3, or Faustus either...
The only ghost ship I have noticed is SD Ravana (which is fixed).
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I never noticed any issues with the Hecate, Dis, SAC3, or Faustus either...
The only ghost ship I have noticed is SD Ravana (which is fixed).
QFT. Although for me, half the Faustus is always missing, and the rest is screwed as far as collision-detection goes.
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Wait...so on some computers, they aren't glitched, and on others they are? :confused:
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Thus is with most bugs.
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I did some fairly intensive ramming and shooting tests on all the models from all sorts of angles - if I could fly in or shoot through them anywhere, they needed fixing and retesting. A lot of the holes I found were not nearly as obvious as those on the original Aten, but it still counted as broken.
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Wouldn't it be easier to recompile the broken models through a different exporter, like the Truespace one?
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Ideally, we nshould be able to have exporters to POF or PMF from any modeling application as well as a way for said applications to directly import POF or PMF instead of conversions.
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Wouldn't it be easier to recompile the broken models through a different exporter, like the Truespace one?
I thought the same thing, but I'd forgotten about smoothing. One of the biggest advantages of the pof exporter is how it preserves smoothgroups beautifully - far better than PCS2 can, and moreover PCS2 can't export those smoothgroups from the POFs in the first place.
So, if I were to re-convert say, the Hecate I would have to manually try and recreate the smoothgroups one by one using TS's retarded handling of the smoothing system. This would take forever and look really crappy. ;)
It's kinda a trade off one way or another with all the conversion methods.
- The POF exporter does beautiful smoothgroups, converts directly to POF meaning it bypasses TS, but it often has major stability issues with the POFs it produces.
- Using TS as a launching platform usually produces stable POFs, but means you have to try and use the thing in some way - which is a horrible thing.
- Using 3d exploration as a launching platform can sometimes bypass TS, but usually mucks up more things than that solves.
- Using Blender as a launching platform with Waters modified COB export script usually works very well, but you won't have much control over smoothgroups at all since Blender barely supports them anyway.
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Ideally, we nshould be able to have exporters to POF or PMF from any modeling application as well as a way for said applications to directly import POF or PMF instead of conversions.
This is what Collada (http://www.khronos.org/collada/) (COLLAborative Design Activity) is for. There's a movement to make it the new industry standard for 3D model interchange, particularly for porting from 3D authoring software into 3D games. Max, Blender, and a bunch of others have growing support for it.
All we need is for Kazan and/or Bobboau to write support for it into PCS, which is their project for the summer. *waits*
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I don't know if this can help, but we had a problem with the INFA Hercules(which comes straight from the MVPs): basically there was a blind spot in the shields that allowed weapons to damage the hull directly.
You may wish to check the Herc...
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Same thing happens with the SB Seraphim. Blob fire from the front can damage the hull...
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As is the case with many ships (in FS1 at least). Getting hit with a blob, even at full shields, will severely damage a fighter.
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I would note that the 3.6.8 vp version of the Aten has at least some issues. The ship is somehow able to shoot through itself at you from a number of angles. Then again, the retail version of the ship did that. Doesn't make it right that it can, though.
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I would note that the 3.6.8 vp version of the Aten has at least some issues. The ship is somehow able to shoot through itself at you from a number of angles. Then again, the retail version of the ship did that. Doesn't make it right that it can, though.
And you can shoot through it.
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No duh, if it can shoot through itself then the player can too.
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That was kinda obvious before you said that. Maybe I just added that for, I don't know, emphasis?
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I used to love the Hercules, but I don't use it in the Freespace Port anymore because it ALWAYS gets damaged by a couple of hits from an Anubis.
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:wtf:
Maybe that's because you have no shields when you fight an Anubis?
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Hammer of Light missions? Custom missions? Cardinal Spear? Multiplayer?
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You don't get the Herc until you have shields... (in the main FS campaign). You only get Apollos and Valks.
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:wtf:
Maybe that's because you have no shields when you fight an Anubis?
:rolleyes:
I think I'd expect that if I didn't have shields thank you very much.
No, I'm thinking Tenderizer. The watchdogs usually damage my hull on the first hit.
I can't confirm this with fraps or anything because I'm currently without a decent computer
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Actually I think I'll start a new thread for collision error hunting - this one kinda switched topic.
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You don't get the Herc until you have shields... (in the main FS campaign). You only get Apollos and Valks.
But the Anubii have shields later in the campaign.
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Yea, when you face the HoL.
I was stating that it is impossible to not have shields with a Herc (in the main FS campaign), unless you're playing the Kill Lucifer mission.
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The Serapis is definately buggered. Shots tend to pass right through even when one strafes the easy to hit top of the thing.
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The only collision/hitbox problem I've ever seen was with the Faustus in both retail and FSO.
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No duh, if it can shoot through itself then the player can too.
Not always true. I've seen plenty of ships where a turret's FOV allows it to shoot through the ship. For some reason the shots don't impact the ship's hull, even though the ship has fine collision detection.
And do you guys plan to do anything about that origin-of-turret-not-actually-being-inside-the-subobject-mesh syndrome that makes certain turrets near-impossible to hit with missiles (because the missile explodes before it hits any geometry)?
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The Serapis has been repaired already - see the collision detection thread.
And do you guys plan to do anything about that origin-of-turret-not-actually-being-inside-the-subobject-mesh syndrome that makes certain turrets near-impossible to hit with missiles (because the missile explodes before it hits any geometry)?
And this occurs where?
Don't assume we know of every little bug and glitch in the entire fleet. :p I've certainly never seen that.
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This bug occurs in the retail Sathanas and the HTL Ravana. Basically what this means is that the center (origin) of the turret subobject is not inside the mesh, so when you fire missiles from the right (or rather, wrong :P) angle, they detonate before they hit the turret, frequently causing minimal damage. As far as I can tell, this is why you can't take out the Sath's flak guns with Trebuchets in Bearbaiting...
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This bug occurs in the retail Sathanas and the HTL Ravana. Basically what this means is that the center (origin) of the turret subobject is not inside the mesh, so when you fire missiles from the right (or rather, wrong :P) angle, they detonate before they hit the turret, frequently causing minimal damage. As far as I can tell, this is why you can't take out the Sath's flak guns with Trebuchets in Bearbaiting...
This occurs with the Sathanas' forward flak guns.
EDIT: Oops.