Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => The Babylon Project => Topic started by: Trivial Psychic on March 02, 2005, 11:20:00 am
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Howdy all:
Just a quick question... are you (the team) gonna replace the current 3D subspace warp model with more of the cone effect seen in B5... or is that not feasable?
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Somebody has already made that. I have a warp model, with more of the cone effect, on my HD. I think it's Den5's creation... Not sure though...
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a lot more than just a new model is needed though unfortunately.
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Yeah I think that's a limitation of the current game engine.
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Ah, alas..
If only there were some programmers working on extending its capabilities.
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yeah, shame that :)
I have some ideas for how to make a better jum point effect, but unfortunately I lack the time.
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Currently all ships are capable of jumping
But in the Babylon 5 universe only some ships can do so; small ships need a jumphole from an jumpgate or an big ship witch opens a jumphole and all the ships are flying trought the same jumphole at once.
Therefore Jumpholes could be handeled as own objects with an kind of docking facility
-- Is it planned to work toward this issure?
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Originally posted by MovGP0
Currently all ships are capable of jumping
But in the Babylon 5 universe only some ships can do so; small ships need a jumphole from an jumpgate or an big ship witch opens a jumphole and all the ships are flying trought the same jumphole at once.
Therefore Jumpholes could be handeled as own objects with an kind of docking facility
-- Is it planned to work toward this issure?
Easy. You just need some add some sexps in FRED to make smaller ship to jump only by jumpgates or with bigger ships. The only problem is that the jumpout doesn't look exactly as the one in series (no big acceleration/deceleration, flat jump-point).
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You know it's surprisingly difficult to get a ship to pull along side a bigger ship. Use stay near and they sort of hang around behind the bigger ship. Use guard and they fly circles around it. Either way it looks daft when they vanish (no warp effect departure) as the bigger ship leaves.
As for adding multiple ships leaving using the same jump point as a game engine mechanic rather than just a sexp hack. Well... I can think of a number of ways of doing it but they're all fairly elaborate. Not straight forward at all.
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hmm...why not put a waypoint reeaaaally far away from the jump point and order the AI to move towards it? Better it, make it a hostile ship, and ask the enemy to chase it. Then they'll move alongside the big ship.......
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Originally posted by Singh
Then they'll move alongside the big ship.......
No, they'll move in the same direction as the big ship. That's different to being along side it ;)
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What we need for that would be:
A), a method of overriding the coded top speeds and acceleration/deceleration factors during jump-in/out as part of a ship's table entry,
B), a method of, again by entry in ships table entry, to indicate that a vessel should have no warp effect. Now, you might say that that can be done already with FRED, but the current option will merely cause the object to vanish without the acceleration and deceleration associated with warpout/warpin. We want the ship to go through the motions of warpin/warpout, just without the effect.
Then, say you want fighters (including player) to jump out with a destroyer. As the destroyer approaches its jumpout position, use the stay-near-ship sexp to order the other fighters to formup on the destroyer. By the time the destroyer is in jump position, the fighters should be alongside it. When the player is within a certain distance of the destroyer and is facing towards a certain waypoint that the destroyer is facing (if that can't be done yet, it would help alot if it were), order all fighters and the destroyer to jump out, and use the force-jump sexp to ensure that the player jumps out. I key the jump time off the player's proximity to the destroyer, the player's orientation to the waypoint, and to the destroyer having completed moving into position. You could key it off all included wings being in proximity to the destroyer, including the player, but if one entire wing is eliminated, the event wouldn't fire. So by the time the destroyer is in its jump position, all the remaining fighters should be in proximity, which only leaves the player. If you're already there when the time comes, and you're oriented properly, jump-time!
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So, what we have:
- There will be the need for an 3D-Jumpgate where the ships can fly in.
- At the moment the ships enteres the Jumpgate the ships have to fly throught the event-horizon (X) like with the current effect.
- ships have to go faster within the jumppoint - but they also need to keep together (warp-scale-effect)
- For the arange of the ships (Y) and the player (P) we need a special command like "form on the wing of my target" additional to "defend my target" - not only for the ships (Y) but also for the player (P).
- only ships with turrents can defend to enemies behind; jumpout has to go on even a ship gets destroyed (*); mission fails when a mission-critical ship or player gets destroyed during jumpout.
- Similar effect for jump-in. (the current solution works good but not perfect)
some ASCII-Art about:
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/
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/ Y Y
/ Y Y * ........... /------------\
/ X | enemy ship |>>>
| X /-----------\ \------------/
| X | big ship |>>>
| X \-----------/
\ X
\ Y Y Y
\ Y P
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\
\
Notes:
- the jumppoint should more look like a nurbs-curve when created by ships and more like a tunnel when created by jumpgates
- The event-horizon has to look like a sun and acts like the current flat jumpout.
- when the jumpgate closes all the ships within are jumped out - not destroyed
- ships within the space of the opening jumpgate or colliding with it needs to get destroyed
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You forgot cake. We need cake.