[Omniscaper]

God bless SCP geniouses

[Nico]

Spline are good for smooth shapes like that, but be sure to check all the angles and smoothgroups, it can do weird things from times to times, tho they're very easy to fix.
Anyway, 7000 polys for a lod? For lod2?!? Man, that's nonsense.

[IceFire]

Just a word on the flight deck stuff.  Bobboau recently implemented some abilities for dealing with the flight decks and added details in that area of the ship.

[Omniscaper]

Any and all help from those geniouses are quite welcomed. Anyword on auto landing, and launching capabilities from different dockpoints?

[Omniscaper]

Originally posted by Nico
Spline are good for smooth shapes like that, but be sure to check all the angles and smoothgroups, it can do weird things from times to times, tho they're very easy to fix.
Anyway, 7000 polys for a lod? For lod2?!? Man, that's nonsense.

Hey, I'm personally not a fan of LOD's period, but after running some test furballs with 20+ fighters and the 50k Galactica, those polygon crunching numbers turns the game to a near slide show of 12 FPS.

The 7000 poly lod1 is much less than the 18k (with deck detail)lod0. Lod2 will have 2k. I can perhaps go even further and go for 800 polys with an lod3.

Considering the size of that ship, I still think LOD's won't help the scenario by much, because you can never get that far away from her during a typical dogfight. To have 3 lod transitions spanning across 30km I think would be sufficient.

Of course I can speed up ALL fighters to have a max speed of 200+ and minimum of 100. Are there any mods that sped up their fighters, without affecting AI stupidity?


I've assembled 1932 polygon LOD3, still looks accurate (my perfectionist side is hating this)




Keep in mind none of these meshes have been optimized and visually nitpicked. So those poly numbers will keep shrinking.
Does anyone want to help with this mesh beast?

[KARMA]

well 2k for a lod 2 sound more reasonable than your first statement of 10k:)
I think you still could cut something (for example, 4-5k for lod1, 1-1,5 for lod2 and 300-500 for lod3) but it should already work. Probably you could cut some mesh details from the lower lods using baked textures from the top one?

[Nico]

There was mods like Sushi's Velocity mod that would double the speed for the regular FS and FS2 campaigns ( mmh, wisely made, like he recaculated all the missile locking duration, etc ) I was a big fan of that, and, well, the Ai would go too fast to actually bump against anything it would just miss it, bombers wouldn't stupidely run into their target as they blow up, etc. I think the dumbiness of the AI is actually helped by a higher speed. Also makes dogfights much more... more

As for Lods, no matter what the main lod is, I try to keep lod 1 below 1000 triangles and the other lods are half the previous lod. Last lod has 50 polys max, I suppose. There's really no need to go overboard with polys, dunno, look at my ezechiel fighter, the main lod as a whooping 4367 triangles, wich  I consider is an awful lot for a fighter, but, on the other hand, lod 1 is only 351 triangles. Passed a certain range, range that is not necesseraly  too far away, polycount and curves don't really matter, you can simulate a very detailled ship very well just thanks to a good overal shape and a good map. A single rendered map, btw: I don't see what's got into 's mind, using toned down tiled maps on lods is... dumb.
Anyway, really, I too try to keep it as close as possible as the main lod, I hate deleting whole details too, but, ingame, that just doesn't show.

[Deepblue]

I'm actually not sure if he did the Galactica, but he has done a cruiser and a couple of Viper incarnations. (he still hasn't uploaded his stuff yet so it's a moot point) And he already said he doesn't care what people do with his stuff.

[Deepblue]

Originally posted by Nico
There was mods like Sushui's mod that would double the speed for the regular FS and FS2 campaigns ( mmh, wisely made, like he recaculated all the missile locking duration, etc ) I was a big fan of that, and, well, the Ai would go too fast to actually bump against anything it would just miss it, bombers wouldn't stupidely run into their target as they blow up, etc. I think the dumbiness of the AI is actually helped by a higher speed. Also makes dogfights much more... more

As for Lods, no matter what the main lod is, I try to keep lod 1 below 1000 triangles and the other lods are half the previous lod. Last lod has 50 polys max, I suppose. There's really no need to go overboard with polys, dunno, look at my ezechiel fighter, the main lod as a whooping 4367 triangles, wich  I consider is an awful lot for a fighter, but, on the other hand, lod 1 is only 351 triangles. Passed a certain range, range that is not necesseraly  too far away, polycount and curves don't really matter, you can simulate a very detailled ship very well just thanks to a good overal shape and a good map. A single rendered map, btw: I don't see what's got into 's mind, using toned down tiled maps on lods is... dumb.
Anyway, really, I too try to keep it as close as possible as the main lod, I hate deleting whole details too, but, ingame, that just doesn't show.

Sushi
One problem with the mod is that if you activated subspace drive while going fast, you ended up flying right past the portal (and then the game would end).

Mmmm, I still think I have the source files on my computer.

EDIT: Bah! His My Documents folder is locked!

[Nico]

typo

Yeah, your ship would go too far compared to the subspace rift, but that was the only problem I've ever had.

[SA22C]

Just how big is the Galactica supposed to be?

I was under the impression that she was around 1.2 km at best.  That would make her smaller than an Orion, no?

[Omniscaper]

Galactica around 4000 feet long.

What would be the best way to have Caprica look like she's being nuked? Are the use of ani's possible with a skybox? I was thinking putting som explosion ani's underneath transpraent cloud layers to my Earth skybox ( heavily modified to look like Caprica)

[KARMA]

mmm what about 3d shockwaves? it'd be a bit cartoony but you could make some relatively high poly lightning spheres growing under that cloud layers

[NGTM-1R]

Originally posted by Omniscaper
Galactica around 4000 feet long.

What would be the best way to have Caprica look like she's being nuked? Are the use of ani's possible with a skybox? I was thinking putting som explosion ani's underneath transpraent cloud layers to my Earth skybox ( heavily modified to look like Caprica)

That's a bit more then a mile...

The Galatica would come in at or slightly above two kilometers, then. Roughly Orion-sized.

[Falcon]

*is wanting that 51,634 poly Galactica*

[Grimloq]

51000 polys? doable in TRUESPACE! ^_^



nice model... mm.... *munches on model happily* tastes like... tastes like spahgetti

[SA22C]

Originally posted by ngtm1r


That's a bit more then a mile...

The Galatica would come in at or slightly above two kilometers, then. Roughly Orion-sized.

A mile is 5280 feet.  4000 feet is around 1300-1400 meters, give or take.  The Galactica is smaller than most Destroyer class vessels in Freespace.

[Liberator]

Yet, it seems so much larger and has so many more guns;7

[Roanoke]

does it have any large weapons, or just lots of small point defence turrets ?

[Raptor]

Well, I can't say about the 'New' version, but I can tell you about the Originals sizes.

Like all Si-Fi show, the Galatica kept changing sizes, depending on which shot you used and what you used as a mesuring stick.

I won't go into details, but heres the summary:

Offical length: 600m (no chance, and has no On-Screen support)
~1.2Km long (Based off Vipers landing in bay and launch tubes)
~4Km long (based off Raiders shadows as they fly over Galatica)
~6Km long (I think this was based off comparision of just launched Vipers with side hanger pods)

Note: the length of the Viper is uncertain.  The full size mock-up was ~9m long, but the miniture used in the space shots was (apprently) proportionly longer.  Go figure.