[MeekGeek]

And I am wondering whats new !

After an illness-enforced break from pretty much everything computer related, I am finally back in the saddle, and thinking about messing around with spaceships again!

While I was 'away' I have come up with a fair few ideas for a total conversion using the FS2 SCP engine, and I wondred if the modding community had progressed in some of the areas I remember as being 'problems'...

Heres the 'sticky' areas...

1) I need 3D planetary systems. Preferably destructable ones. I know there were planet objects made a while back, but these were scaled down. Can real...orbiting...individually destructable solar systems be done ?

2) FRED has a very small 'playing area' which was giving me trouble. Some of teh ships I wanted to use were quite big....and this made placing objects a bit awkward! Can the space usable for a mission builder be enlarged?

3) Are visible weapons on external pylons workable now ?

4) Capship combat.... know...I don';t know much abuot this, but I planned teh ships to be fighting 'broadside' style, with fixed beams and torpedo launching. Has capship behavious in combat improved any ... or is it heavily scripted ?

If anyone is interested, I can outline in a bit more detail what I had in mind

[karajorma]

2) You've got a huge playing area as it is. More would mean increased memory requirements. Right now a fast ship takes 10 minutes to fly across the game area without using afterburners. There's no real need for more than that as far as I can see.

3) Yep.

4) Heavily scripted or you simply get the ships to move in a straight line.

[Taristin]

For 4) I've always noticed that the ships broadside by default, just when orderred to attack eachother.  I sent a deimos and a moloch at eachother, and all they did was fly in circles around eachother trying to se their side turrets.

[DaBrain]

Originally posted by MeekGeek

1) I need 3D planetary systems. Preferably destructable ones. I know there were planet objects made a while back, but these were scaled down. Can real...orbiting...individually destructable solar systems be done ?

Yes, but it's pretty hard to do.
Check Omniscraper's Deathstar. You could use the sub-lod feature to create cities and mountains.

The whole planet can destuctable.

Orbiting still has one flaw. You can't change the skybox in-game ATM.

There might be a way around this though...


Anyway this is some tough stuff, but very tempting too.


If you want to work on this kind of innovative stuff, you should join the SF: SoL mod. We're trying to push the FS2 engine to it's limit.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by DaBrain
Orbiting still has one flaw. You can't change the skybox in-game ATM.

Actually you can. You can't use it for animation though. That would be a nightmare to make work.

Take a look at how the knossos is put together (Invisible box with visible rotating subsystems). You probably could adapt that to give you a rotating planet.