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Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: MatthTheGeek on December 16, 2013, 12:22:43 pm

Title: Unofficial Star Citizen Dogfight Module
Post by: MatthTheGeek on December 16, 2013, 12:22:43 pm
I need to find a shorter name for that, it's quite a mouthful.

So yes, this is mostly, for now a barebone proof-of-concept of import and conversion of Star Citizen ships into FSO.

Featuring for now, the P52 Merlin (http://starcitizen.wikia.com/wiki/P52_Merlin), with placeholder stats and weapons, and a single dogfight mission with waves of two enemy fighters against you.

Download v0.2a Standalone (https://www.mediafire.com/?m6qysqc7ob2cpb6) (Mediafire)

(http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/2724/0yy4.png)

This uses the MVPs for now (2014 beta, but should probably work on .12 as well), but should eventually become standalone. This is now standalone. Yayifications!

Any feedback on what I have so far is welcome.

EDIT: rorry, clicked on the wrong subforum. Thanks to E for fixin'

Link to the release thread on the SC forums (https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/91107/release-unofficial-dogfight-module-v0-2a-19-12-2013)
Title: Re: Unofficial Star Citizen Dogfight Module
Post by: Lykurgos88 on December 16, 2013, 12:35:58 pm
This is awesome! Downloading now.  :D

Chris has to try hard if he's gonna beat the FSO space combat gameplay.
Title: Re: Unofficial Star Citizen Dogfight Module
Post by: Nyctaeus on December 16, 2013, 01:44:31 pm
Alrough the design is pretty cool and extremly well-detailed, I'm wondering if we can found any usage for this. This is somekind of a fighter, and for today standards in FSO, 20-30k polys for a fighter/bomber is pretty high. What's with 172k? If this thing would even be useful, it requires some serious optymalization or at least LODs. Despite that, cool stuff from Star Citizen is always welcome :D.
Title: Re: Unofficial Star Citizen Dogfight Module
Post by: MetalDestroyer on December 17, 2013, 01:21:33 am
What, where is the Hornet ? the Freelancer, the Aurora ? :ninja:
Title: Re: Unofficial Star Citizen Dogfight Module
Post by: MatthTheGeek on December 17, 2013, 02:17:55 am
(http://vuible.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/85c9d3636f9e6e227580ba2b967ef2b3.jpg)
Title: Re: Unofficial Star Citizen Dogfight Module
Post by: MatthTheGeek on December 18, 2013, 08:31:10 am
The v0.2 Standalone is now released. If possible, I'd like to have basic functionality feedback on this before officially releasing it in the SC forums :)

This ships with a shadow/defered exe, but should work with any recent nightly.

EDIT: for info, a fatal bug related to sound tables will be fixed in the next release. If you encounter a CTD after a couple minutes of gameplay, that's the one. Sorry! Official release should be this evening or tomorrow. My thanks to Kobrar for his testing.
Title: Re: Unofficial Star Citizen Dogfight Module
Post by: coffeesoft on December 18, 2013, 06:10:52 pm
Nice ship, and nice colors  :)
Title: Re: Unofficial Star Citizen Dogfight Module
Post by: Shivan Hunter on December 18, 2013, 06:36:53 pm
So I tried this earlier today (**** Mediafire). Very fun, and excellent job converting the model to FS!

The only technical issue I see is that it gets a bit laggy with several ships on screen. That's no surprise given the number of polies on the Merlin, but I noticed it had no LODs. (I might be able to check that out sometime, since I have free time now and Blender is awesome)

About the gameplay (I know it's just POC now) - how much is actually known about SC ships/weapons? Will it be easy to translate what they have into numbers for FS?

Excellent work! the SC fans will probably be nerdgasming over this.
Title: Re: Unofficial Star Citizen Dogfight Module
Post by: MatthTheGeek on December 19, 2013, 03:07:54 am
That's no surprise given the number of polies on the Merlin, but I noticed it had no LODs.
More or less waiting on CIG to do them for me (Hornet will get LODs for the DFM).

About the gameplay (I know it's just POC now) - how much is actually known about SC ships/weapons? Will it be easy to translate what they have into numbers for FS?
We know little and everything we know right now is subject to change. There are things that we definitely won't be able to emulate with FSO as it is (destroyable manoeuvring thrusters, for example) and some that will require some heavy trickery if we want to emulate them (shield penetration depending on shield thickness vs ammo used), but nothing stroke me as extremely problematic so far.

I'll try to make it very clear in the release post SC-side that this won't be able to replicate perfectly SC gameplay nor is it trying to.
Title: Re: Unofficial Star Citizen Dogfight Module
Post by: MetalDestroyer on December 19, 2013, 03:30:33 am
Damn, if Gran Turismo 6 wasn't there; I would gladly take a look. :)
Title: Re: Unofficial Star Citizen Dogfight Module
Post by: MatthTheGeek on December 19, 2013, 04:01:50 am
Link has been updated to v0.2a. Released on the SC forums (see bottom of first post).
Title: Re: Unofficial Star Citizen Dogfight Module
Post by: MatthTheGeek on January 03, 2014, 08:30:02 am
Sneaky WIP

(http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/6480/3hw6.png) (http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/6480/3hw6.png)

Original for comparison
(http://img837.imageshack.us/img837/6580/jncq.png) (http://img837.imageshack.us/img837/6580/jncq.png)

Need to figure out why colour mapping is off.
Title: Re: Unofficial Star Citizen Dogfight Module
Post by: pecenipicek on January 03, 2014, 12:07:18 pm
invert the mask?
Title: Re: Unofficial Star Citizen Dogfight Module
Post by: MatthTheGeek on January 03, 2014, 03:44:26 pm
Ok I found it and it's pretty heavy ****.

They use vertex color to tint particular tilemapped areas of meshes.

The Aurora normally:
(http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/1190/3av5.png)

Now with vertex color disabled on a particular material:
(http://img853.imageshack.us/img853/7161/k9ex.png)

Disregarding the fact that neither FSO's graphic code nor the pof format support vertex coloring (or at least not on textured objects, cf jump nodes) (source: The E), it seems that neither obj nor fbx export from the CryEngine Sandbox preserve vertex colors to begin with (obj doesn't even support it), which means I can't even manually/scriptically sort vertexes by colors and assign them different textures to match the color scheme.

I'm gonna investigate other ways to convert cgf/cga from CryEngine, but I doubt they won't have the same problem. It looks like I'm pretty screwed on that front.

I'm open to ideas.

I swear, tilemapping will be the death of me
Title: Re: Unofficial Star Citizen Dogfight Module
Post by: Kobrar44 on January 03, 2014, 05:57:31 pm
The only two ways I see are to either use one tile per one color or to give this thing proper uv-mapping. I can take care of either.
Title: Re: Unofficial Star Citizen Dogfight Module
Post by: MatthTheGeek on January 04, 2014, 02:41:30 am
The "one tile per color" solution is what I meant when I talked about

Quote
manually/scriptically sort vertexes by colors and assign them different textures to match the color scheme.

which I can't do since color isn't even exported, which means the info on where the color is is lost in conversion. I would have to guess based on what I see in the sandbox and manually reassign each face to a different material, which would be even more time-consuming and error-prone, not to mention it would require me to learn how to modelling software, which I'm actively trying to avoid for my sanity's sake.
Title: Re: Unofficial Star Citizen Dogfight Module
Post by: MatthTheGeek on January 05, 2014, 07:28:22 am
Welp, given up on colors.

(http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/7407/5m9f.png) (http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/7407/5m9f.png)

On to engine and weapons now.