Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: Kusanagi on August 22, 2010, 04:10:07 am
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For the Homeworld thing I'm having fun doing (not officially part of TAP) I've been spending the last few days getting different ships working and some mechanics, and am finally ready to tackle salvaging. While I doubt it's going to end up being a player controlled option (we'll see!) I've been trying to figure out the best way to move the "captured" ships from point A to point B once the salvage corvettes latch on.
The corvette can't push the thing as it will swing an entire cruiser around, so the only thing I can think of is to repair the captured ship's engines and set it to move towards the Mothership/carrier.
The problem is, to my knowledge, there's no way to disable a ship's engine glow when the engine is above 0%, and you can't move a ship when it has a disabled engine. Is there any way to do this?
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You can't dock the ship to it and move it that way? Even a fighter can move a cap ship if docked to it.
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I can, but there's more than one salvager attached to it. Realistically, a 40m ship shouldn't be able to make a 2k long ship swing around so fast that everyone inside gets turned into strawberry jelly.
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You can't dock the ship to it and move it that way? Even a fighter can move a cap ship if docked to it.
In Homeworld you required multiple corvettes to capture a capital ship. So the game used the capship's orientation to decide which direction to move things in rather than the corvettes. If you make the corvette push the ship it will use the corvette's orientation not the capships.
Not sure what the best solution would be though.
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Use change-ship-class operator and dummy ship class with thrusters deleted from POF.
I think that's the only way.
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Or use the set-object-speed SEXPs through a given axis. ;)
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It'll be instantly reset to 0 if newtonian dampening isn't used and even if it is, speed would start decreasing.
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Then a) use Newtonian dampening and b) add repeat counts to the event with a delay of 1 second to keep the speed.
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It may help if ship is flying in a straight line, but will not allow manouvering easly.
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Use change-ship-class operator and dummy ship class with thrusters deleted from POF.
I think that's the only way.
This seems like the easiest solution...let me give it a try and I'll see.
EDIT: Wow, that works perfectly!
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(http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/8571/screen0024.jpg) (http://img822.imageshack.us/i/screen0024.jpg/)
That did the trick. It means there's gonna be dome limitations regarding salvaging (it will have to be exclusively handled in FRED) but it looks like it should!
BTW, the scales are as they should be. Normally strike craft are 3 times bigger, but there's no way a salvage corvette is the size of a football field at over 100m long. Converting the measurements to feet for strike craft ends up with a much more realistic scale.
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Actually, I think a corvette should be about 100m long.
It should be true to scale with HW.
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HERETIC
HE ****ED WITH THE SCALES
HERETIC
BURN HIM NAO
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I discussed this at length with a few people in the Homeworld community. The general units used in the first two homeworld games are generally accepted as feet, based on this picture:
(http://shipyards.relicnews.com/concept/images/corvette40.jpg)
This door is visible on the side of the Taiidani corvettes. The door is six "units" tall in game. Either the door is 6 meters high, or around 6 feet high. Same deal with the Kushan corvettes: They're all two seater craft and the ship guide mentions that every corvette interior is so cramped that a mechanic must seal the pilots in with an armor plate from the outside. If each corvette is a hundred meters long then the canopy glass is several stories tall and each cockpit is the size of a bedroom on smaller craft. It doesn't fit in line with some of the official concept art.
In Homeworld 2, the units are meters based on one or two common ship model files and comments from Relic itself. There's an option to make the ships actual size in the command line, but doing so makes bombers and fighters nearly invisible except for their trails.
The reason I felt that the ships were larger in Homeworld was to make it visually easier to comprehend, select, and move units.
This puts most fighters and bombers in the 15-20 meter range, and corvettes around 30-40. The Salvage corvette is 35 meters long.
That being said, this doesn't scale well to capital ships. The Taiidan heavy cruiser is 1400 units long - which means at the same scale it is in the game, it would be around 450 meters long - not even twice the size of a Fenris. The mothership would be the largest thing in the game, but it would still be smaller than an Orion stood on end.
I decided for "realism" sake to scale units for corvettes and strike craft down to feet (there's no way the kushan scout is 50m long) and the larger vessels for units to meters.
The multibeam frigate in that screencap is 220m long, smaller than a Fenris. The Turanic Carrier, which I imported yesterday with a ton of turrets, is 2400 meters long. Taiidan heavy cruiser is 1400, Kushan heavy cruiser is 1300, etc.
The mothership, however, will be the size of the colly :P After all, it has a population of however many staff it, and 600,000 more in cryo.
Hopefully the scale ends up working well, but the conversions I do are my own take on the Homeworld Universe. While TAP is going to be using some of the models I converted over for the test builds until new ones get made, this little project of mine is something separate :P
So yes, you will be able to fly all the strike craft in the game.
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Screw realism. Get back to real ingame scale NAO or I officially hate you.
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I'd also prefer original scale, realism is fine if you're doing something original or based on something realistic (or with no clearly defined scale), but I think you should stick to HW scale.
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Those look insanely small, bigger is better. (most of the times anyway :P )
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I guess Matt is going to hate me then :P I'm not going to pilot a 60 meter long attack bomber to attack a 400m heavy cruiser :P
It will look fine in game. You also realize if the fighters and corvettes were the same size as their in game counterparts there is no way in hell a carrier could fit 50 fighters and 25 corvettes, right? :P
I also think one of the reasons they look smaller is because they use retail HW textures right now. If the MBF had the same texture detail that one of the SCP ships has on it, it would look much bigger.
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I sucessfully flew 100m long bombers, gunships and even one (two, if you count one I made myself) fighter.
60m is a common lenght for FS bombers.
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That's it, I am officially full of hate for you. You are soiling the Homeworld universe, and this shall not go unpunished !
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I also agree that RTS scaled units just won't translate well to a first person sim. They're almost abstract representations of ships at times. I'd rather see something to make it a bit more realistic, and make a good space sim, than just try to put the player in a fighter in HW. You can do that with the pilotview command in HW1 if that's all you want :P
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I actually want to pilot the fighter, which pilotview doesn't allow.
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I sucessfully flew 100m long bombers, gunships and even one (two, if you count one I made myself) fighter.
60m is a common lenght for FS bombers.
Which has nothing to do with the point I'm trying to make. :P You can pilot a ship as big as the sathanis in the FSO engine. The point is that 100m long corvettes and strike craft goes against tech descriptions, ship textures, and official Homeworld artwork and cutscenes.
The Ursa is only 40 meters long without the thruster geometry. I think anyone can look at heavy corvette and an Ursa and think that having the heavy corvette that's twice the size doesn't visually look well for a space sim, although it works fine for an RTS.
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Are you deleting thruster geometry, or just the thruster special points? I would have just deleted the special points myself. What if you want to script it breaking free? The thruster geometry would just reappear?
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I'm with Kush on the scaling as well because this is Freespace so too bad, gigantic strike craft would look retarded and you know it. Not to mention, are you telling me the people are like 6 meters tall lol? Don't be rediculous, and talk about being easy to hit targets as well.
Frigates and capital ships can stay at the same scale but strike craft are going to be scaled appropriately for Freespace gameplay. I personally think having bigger frigates and capital ships makes it better. In a 20m fighter you can fly close to them and through gaps, hangar bays, and stuff like that in a 60m fighter you would just crash into the sides.
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Are you deleting thruster geometry, or just the thruster special points? I would have just deleted the special points myself. What if you want to script it breaking free? The thruster geometry would just reappear?
Just the special points. I haven't put in any thruster geometry.
As far as breaking free, you would just use another ship-change-class expression, since it transfers all the values over automatically to the new class. I tried it last night and it worked great.
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When you're done with this little project, will you be releasing it as a mod? I'd love to work with it until TAP releases some stuff.
Also, I agree that the changed scale makes a lot of sense for the purposes. Maybe you can make a short one-mission mod with what you have to show stuff off?
Excellent work so far!
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That be the plan! Hopefully it will work out that way.
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Oh god, now I have to kill everyone who agreed with Kusanagi on this thread. That's gonna be a lot of work, but this haz to be done.
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HEY! NO! No. Just no.
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More blood on my hands, then? Add it to the small lake. :lol:
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Which has nothing to do with the point I'm trying to make. :P You can pilot a ship as big as the sathanis in the FSO engine. The point is that 100m long corvettes and strike craft goes against tech descriptions, ship textures, and official Homeworld artwork and cutscenes.
What you need to remember though is that a good deal of people in this forum firmly believe that all that (Red) stuff is moot; only what's in-game matters and nothing else. :P
Not that I'm one of them.
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Even the one thing in that list that's in game is a significant thing though.