Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => Fate of the Galaxy => Topic started by: Marcov on May 28, 2010, 11:28:10 pm
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Just asking - is it possible to create a Death Star 1 in FreeSpace? If the Inferno team were able to create an Earth-sized, then creating a Death Star should be possible.
But that'd be too plot tool anyways...
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Well the biggest problems here are with the AI and no clue how to avoid hitting big objects. Second is with actually approaching a big object like that. It would probably have to be more then one mission one with a skybox of the Death Star and the second with a landscape model if your talking something with surface combat.
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Well the biggest problems here are with the AI and no clue how to avoid hitting big objects. Second is with actually approaching a big object like that. It would probably have to be more then one mission one with a skybox of the Death Star and the second with a landscape model if your talking something with surface combat.
Can't AI.tbl (or some file like that) be edited to make a ship 100% accurate? Also, what's a skybox anyway? Just create a huge ship, that's all. It's just 6 times bigger than a Gigas, BTW.
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It's possible, but obviously only if you severely limit the detailing. Either you'll get a DS with no greebles at all or you limit the mission area to a very small greebled portion of the overall surface area.
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Well the biggest problems here are with the AI and no clue how to avoid hitting big objects. Second is with actually approaching a big object like that. It would probably have to be more then one mission one with a skybox of the Death Star and the second with a landscape model if your talking something with surface combat.
Can't AI.tbl (or some file like that) be edited to make a ship 100% accurate? Also, what's a skybox anyway? Just create a huge ship, that's all. It's just 6 times bigger than a Gigas, BTW.
I think he means a "painted" version for the missions in which the Death Star is just on the background, like a normal planet.
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Can't AI.tbl (or some file like that) be edited to make a ship 100% accurate? Also, what's a skybox anyway? Just create a huge ship, that's all. It's just 6 times bigger than a Gigas, BTW.
Go ahead. Get the Whitehall installation, and make a mission surrounding it. Watch the AI, as it keeps bumping into the station while pursuing targets or just trying to get places.
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Go ahead. Get the Whitehall installation, and make a mission surrounding it. Watch the AI, as it keeps bumping into the station while pursuing targets or just trying to get places.
Why not put the Death Star in one corner, like 20 clicks or so from you, while the opposing forces meet at the opposite corner, 20 clicks from the DS?
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Because at those distances, you're better off just using a skybox. Would probably look better and not suck as many resources.
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I believe one of the older SW mods had a Death Star, but it like most of the other assets was very low poly...
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40 clicks at the speeds in FotG isn't _that_ far. And we're fiddling with some of that stuff right now. But an entire DS1 is probably not too feasible.
The AI.tbl can make the AI much more convincing, but there's still a lot left to do in making them not run into stuff. That code hasn't actually been touched much yet.
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But it isn't very close, either. Take a look at Black Wolf's Forthright mission.
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If a battle is occuring, as you pointed out, 20km from the DS, why not set traitor messages or self-destruct/warp-out cues if the player leaves the mission area? So far as I see it, the point is to keep them in a battle away from the Death Star, so that all those beautiful greebles are irrelevant (since they'd suck too many resources as it is). Though as a part of that, perhaps a long-range bombardment from the DS would make sense; during the battle, they start firing into the zone so it becomes more of a challenge to avoid lasers (and less of a chance of a player running off to see the DS).
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Well the biggest problems here are with the AI and no clue how to avoid hitting big objects. Second is with actually approaching a big object like that. It would probably have to be more then one mission one with a skybox of the Death Star and the second with a landscape model if your talking something with surface combat.
Can't AI.tbl (or some file like that) be edited to make a ship 100% accurate? Also, what's a skybox anyway? Just create a huge ship, that's all. It's just 6 times bigger than a Gigas, BTW.
Yes you can make the AI basically never miss shots, but you can't get them from RUNNING INTO **** like a mentally retarded 10-year old running into a wall, bouncing off, and charging straight back into it again :<
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Well, it would seem to be that the major issue is making a system that
we can use to tell the AI an object exists in space... don't go there.
Perhaps that discussion is better game on the scp board though.
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Well the biggest problems here are with the AI and no clue how to avoid hitting big objects. Second is with actually approaching a big object like that. It would probably have to be more then one mission one with a skybox of the Death Star and the second with a landscape model if your talking something with surface combat.
Can't AI.tbl (or some file like that) be edited to make a ship 100% accurate? Also, what's a skybox anyway? Just create a huge ship, that's all. It's just 6 times bigger than a Gigas, BTW.
Accuracy has nothing to do with collision avoidance.
Skyboxes are used to render huge background objects that the player can never reach.
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Skyboxes are used to render huge background objects that the player can never reach.
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Perhaps you could do that, and create a "superlaser" ship - which fires a huge laser of some sort. Problem is: just how are you supposed to make planets "explode" if they're a background/skybox?
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It is somehow possible.
In "Fortune Hunters 2261" for TBP you see a planet destroyed by a Vorlon Planetkiller. And I don't think that planet was a model. You could ask Vidmaster how he did it.
I think I remember something about a SEXP to change background in-mission being mentioned.
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Create a huge explosion effect somewhere in the distance, in front of the planet. There's a create-effect SEXP.
Make the given planet background disappear, again using a SEXP.
Spend some time to test to make the effect credible.
That's how it could be done in FRED.
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And create an asteriod field were the explosion effect took place for good measure :p
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So then...what exactly was this?
(http://swc.fs2downloads.com/media/screenshots/Renders/tiefighterdeathstar.jpg)
I found it on the FoTG website under the screenshots section. Are you still planning to use that...thing?
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That's an old, low-res DS background bitmap.
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That's a render with a background image. That's not a model or anything.
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Didn't Omniscaper (or someone) once release a video of a Death Star trench run as a proof-of-concept of detail boxing? It probably wouldn't be feasible for a gameplay environment, but it looked pretty cool.
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I think it was Hippo that made it. I saw it on the FTP once. It may even be available if you look back. It was highlighted, I would start there.
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So what's everyone talking about now and for what purpose? Is someone going to make a Death Star or what? :nervous:
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Didn't Omniscaper (or someone) once release a video of a Death Star trench run as a proof-of-concept of detail boxing? It probably wouldn't be feasible for a gameplay environment, but it looked pretty cool.
http://swc.fs2downloads.com/movies/DSv2.wmv
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You, sir, are awesome. :yes:
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Well, it's been linked from the website all along, I just try not to draw attention to it since it's not an asset we currently have :P
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For sure, FoTG will not feature DS model with the amount of details seen on the other models (that would slow game down to slideshow on all but most powerfull computers).
If DS will be featured, it'd most likely be done in some interesting, never attempted before way and will both look great and not eat up too much preformance.
We'll see at FoTG release.
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For sure, FoTG will not feature DS model with the amount of details seen on the other models (that would slow game down to slideshow on all but most powerfull computers).
Uh, that's why we were just discussing detail boxes.
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Detail boxes won't save you. Any model with that much size and detail is gonna slow the game down considerably. And I'm not even talking about anywhere near a full greebled Death Star.
In any case, doing something like that has so many obstacles and you'd have to work around so many limitations and quirks of the engine that I'm afraid a superficial and speculative discussion like this just wouldn't be of that much help anyway.
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What about a procedural Death Star via horrible abuse of scripting?
That is, model unique sections of the hull ('brushes' if you're familiar with that lingo). Each one would be a ship, positioned and oriented using Lua. Its subsystems (if it has any) would also be stored using Lua whenever the player is far enough away from it for it to not matter. Then, when the player gets close enough, instead of using the conventional detail boxing, the script would create a ship at the correct position+orientation, with the correct subsystem strengths. Furthermore, you could possibly have an intermediate LOD which would have a decent amount of superficial detail, but no subsystems, via the gr.drawModel function.
Basically you'd only have ships for a few nearby sectors of the Death Star's surface.
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Could scripting help? Since we know that most of the DS is a perfect sphere, non-critical regions could automatically be populated by a set of randomized tiles. The tiles themselves might be akin to the asteroids FS has - they're the same thing, but with a different model. Here's my current thought:
Tile generation, though limited to an extent by certain physical constraints/special regions of the DS/DS2 via algorithm, takes place over most of the general, unimportant surface which the pilot may encounter. There may be around 6 to 9 or more general surface plates, each of which uses the same texture. Initial placement is controlled by range to the DS surface, as well as the range to the closest "placement normal." The highest LOD plate is always the one the pilot is currently over, with detail dropping off rapidly amongst adjacent tiles. I'm thinking you'd draw no more than 25 tiles at a time. Plates would have no real "memory" after they were left of what turrets were destroyed, etc. But seeing as you'd not want to stick around over a surface bristling with turbolasers anyway, it would be a good incentive to get in and get out with the DS...
That said, what I think I'm suggesting is a DS with randomly selected and placed detail boxes - the DS model itself could be quite simple.
NOTE - Post started before Aard's suggestion.
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No way of knowing who started posting first, but whatever.
@Thaeris: I reckon it wouldn't be too difficult to store what turrets/subsystems had been destroyed (or how damaged they were). When the player leaves a sector, you'd shove that information into a table somewhere, so you could load it back if the player ever wanted to go back to that area.
From an optimization point of view, however, it might be better to only store info on damage, since most of the sectors will start out undamaged. You could even set it up so that damage slowly "repairs itself" while nobody's looking. That is, record when a sector was last visible, and when it becomes visible again, increase the health of each subsystem based on that. And periodically check the sectors that aren't real (i.e. the list of sectors with damaged subsystems) to see if they can be "cleaned up" (i.e. all the damage is gone); those ones could then be removed from the list of sectors with damaged subsystems.
So that way, stuff stays damaged/destroyed when you come back to it (for the most part), but if you wait a really long time they repair it. And not just an instantaneous repair job, either.
It even makes sense from a realism perspective; they wouldn't try to repair their turrets if they know the turrets are just going to get blown up again in a few seconds (i.e. if there's an enemy fighter nearby ready to lob some torpedoes at it), and it'd take time to get debris out of the way or do whatever else is necessary to repair or replace a damaged or destroyed turret. It's also possible that they've got a bunch of spare turret assemblies on stand-by. It's a bit of a stretch, though.
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Well, adding more structure to the algoritm might actually speed things up in a way. However, it does mean each tile would need to be linked to a particular region. Such data could be stored in a matrix, which wouldn't be all that intensive at all.
However, what I was suggesting was a sort of temporary storage system - if you're in a place like that, you're not going to stick around. So even if you're about for a few minutes above the current tiles stored in the current memory, once they're left (beyond your FOV), they're gone. If you return to that area, they'll be back, but with none of the damage. And, if you went with the initial prompt I suggested, that section may actually be a different tile.
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So then...what exactly was this?
(http://swc.fs2downloads.com/media/screenshots/Renders/tiefighterdeathstar.jpg)
I found it on the FoTG website under the screenshots section. Are you still planning to use that...thing?
propaganda.............
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It's clearly a still from the movie, used as a background for some FotG ships. And from what looks like a depth-of-field effect and self-shadowing on that interceptor, it's obviously not an in-game screenshot. FSO doesn't support that... yet.
Also, cc, you've got it looking like NeoKnight is the one who said "propaganda.............", fix your quote tags.
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What about a way to render models at different LODs on different sections? Like... one part of the model is 100 KM away, it should be a lower detail than the piece you are about to kamikaze into... instead of all one LOD? Any way to split a model into sections? Like... maybe split the ship into many subships and have them all fit together?
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What about a way to render models at different LODs on different sections? Like... one part of the model is 100 KM away, it should be a lower detail than the piece you are about to kamikaze into... instead of all one LOD? Any way to split a model into sections? Like... maybe split the ship into many subships and have them all fit together?
That's exactly what detail boxes do.
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Honestly, I've worked with many amazing game engines during my years in this industry. We'd need one hell of a sectioning/LOD system with flawless model blend swapping, amazing art, depth of field, and possibly some sort of space fog or something to pull this one off.
...or we can just pull tricks from 10 years ago and have everything pop in @ 1km :)
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I wonder how X-Wing pulled the DS off...
I mean, it wasn't round at all, but the terrain went on forever and was populated by all means of greebles and nasty, nasty turrets...
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Or how about the Rogue Squadron games...
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That's a different genre of games with a different engine that's specifically designed with surfaces and obstacles in mind.