Originally posted by F1gm3nt
I've been contemplating going through all the fighter models and doing some poly smoothing and maybe adding subsystems to them for guns and engines(not sure if engines already work this way). I wqs also considering adding some other detail things like maybe transparent cockpits, guns, misslepods(or somesuch), ect. Seeing as this would unquestionably(sp?) raise the polycounts by quite a bit and would take a massive amount of time on my part, Does anyone think I should do it, or possibly is it just a bad idea in general?
Doing High Poly versions of all of the ships is something the community has been doing slowly anyway so if you want to try you're more than welcome to do so.
As Turambar said, pick a single model, upgrade that and then show us the results. You'll almost certainly get a lot of feedback that will help you with the rest (or make you fling up your arms and stomp away from the community in disgust
)
A couple of quick points though.
1) Don't go mad with the polys
Although the HT&L upgrade means that we can spend more on ships if a ship has too many polys it will completely kill the framerate (especially with fighters).
Karma's Fenris was around 7,000 triangles and Nico's latest fighter is around 4,000 IIRC. I think the highest poly ships anyone have done are Omni's Star Trek conversions at around 10-12,000. Don't go too far above that with capships. In fact you may want to stay a fair bit lower.
2) I believe that the SCP are planning to add external guns and missile pods in FS2_open 3.6.1 anyway. You might want to see how they are doing it rather than wasting time building models that won't be able to use that system.
3) Be careful about doing stuff like adding new subsystems. In player flyable craft too many subsystems can cause crashes. Adding new subsystems to existing craft can break missions which will limit the use of your craft.
Apart from that feel free to give it a try
