[CaptJosh]

I remember the "uglies." IIRC, there was one of em with what looked like TIE fighter solar panels on an X-Wing hull.

[Raptor]

I remember the "uglies." IIRC, there was one of em with what looked like TIE fighter solar panels on an X-Wing hull.

The X-TIE.  Not the worst Ugly there was.  That crown goes to the TYE-Wing.  It was a TIE ball cockpit mated with Y-Wing engines.  So it was slow and plodding with no shields... no wonder other pilots called it the DIE-Wing

Great work on the Zeus VA.  I'll be taking it for a spin later

The Uglys also look good, though I'd perfer one with the same parts each side.  Balanced firepower and all that.

I once cobbled one together.  Herc body, Valk nose and wings, Zeus upper engines and Medusa bomb bays IIRC.  Never took it beyond TS though.

Hows the Arcadia coming anyway?

[Vasudan Admiral]

Can't wait for those to be finished.

They are.
If you're interested, here: http://sectorgame.com/ti-file-dump/VasudanAdmiral/Ships/HTL_Uglies_V1.0.rar

And Raptor - the Arcadia is still going, but it's been put on hold while I've been building these.

[asyikarea51]

The left missile pod on the Comanche comes from the Myrmidon?

I just got this whack idea - take that HTL Loki and swap the side missile racks for two of those missile pods and put them upside down (or upright - doesn't matter), and the HTL Cherokee, but with the Zeus-ish wing array copied on the left side instead of the widely spaced Hercules I left gun array. And probably leave the Valkyrie's nose guns and the Hercules' lower body gun racks alone...

Should be interesting for anyone seeking an artillery variant of the Loki, or a fast-response interceptor-bomber methinks...

And I was influenced by this quote

The Uglys also look good, though I'd prefer one with the same parts each side. Balanced firepower and all that.

[CaptJosh]

Oh man, yeah. I forgot about the DIE-Wing...Yeesh. Whose brainchild was that one and why weren't they executed for making it?

[DaBrain]

Very cool...

Adding it to he MV_assets now.

[Commander Zane]

This looks way better than normal.
Now if only the devs didn't ever put that Eurotiger style nose, (Where the pilot's section is lower than the co-pilot's) this ship would be super sexy.

[Polpolion]

This would make a good highlight, you know.

...

...

[Herra Tohtori]

Question.

Why is there one megabyte of completely, utterly needles file in the download? The IBX file of the model is autogenerated to data folder, it's simply waste of bandwidth to host it with the actually needed files. Of course, it's *only* about 400 kB compressed, but still... Hundred users downloading it and it goes all the way up to 40 MB bandwidth used for almost nothing (if my calculations are correct)...



Otherwise...

[Taristin]

Its not used for nothing. It saves time that would otherwise be used in game calculating and creating the IBX file. It may be trivial for you, but do you know how many people have slower machines, and would think that the game froze or crashed, while it was still loading? You know how many complaints there'd be?

[Herra Tohtori]

Possibly... On the other hand it could be argued that not all have as fast connections than you and me. And the players with older computers should know that the loading times are rather large when using high-poly models. In my view, it's like bying not only pre-sliced but also partially pre-chewed bread...

It's fine by me, it's not my bandwidth. I was just wondering if there was any reason for including it or was it inadvertently included to the download.


Anyway, I did some playing around with show ships flag and the new cockpit-texture. I found out that the HUD screen in many models seems to have some difficulties with being transparent. Also the reflections are kinda FUBAR, and my conclusion is that it's probably because for some reason, the sides of the HUD plate are not just two square polygons but instead consist of some triangles, of which some faces point to one way and some to another, and for example in case of Hercules figher, where the HUD is visible from upward angle, the HUD is transparent all right but also parts of the fighter's nose behind the HUD become transparent.

I don't know if this is a bug or a feature but it looks rather ugly... I can post screenshots if the matter needs clarifying.

[neoterran]

This thing looks amazingly awesome.

btw - you're doing a HTL Loki ? Thank Bosch! We're in desperate need.

[taylor]

It's fine by me, it's not my bandwidth. I was just wondering if there was any reason for including it or was it inadvertently included to the download.

IBX files are meant to be made once, which means that they should be distributed with the POF.  I'm about to the point of *****-slapping all of the people who don't distribute IBX files.  So, you could consider VA's move a service to the community at large, or just self-preservation since not doing it would have pissed me off, and that's not a good thing. 


Regarding the new model though, awesome.  Except for one thing, no insignia.  Considering the work I'm doing to make them render better (DDS support and blending/lighting improvements, they actually look painted on in most cases now) and make them easy to test through the Lab, it really sucks when new models don't have this capability.

[Herra Tohtori]

I'll keep that in mind if I ever release any kind of modelwork...

[Vasudan Admiral]

Regarding the new model though, awesome.  Except for one thing, no insignia.  Considering the work I'm doing to make them render better (DDS support and blending/lighting improvements, they actually look painted on in most cases now) and make them easy to test through the Lab, it really sucks when new models don't have this capability.

Oh - the insignia's being worked on code wise? Sweet, but you really gotta announce these things somewhere more obvious.

Well, half the reason I didn't include an insignia was because they'd always looked rather ugly to me - like a glowmap in some cases. The high poly ship hulls present a bit of a problem too. Surfaces that were once flat are sometimes now at least moderately greebled, either shrinking or forcing the insignias off alltogether .

Errm, the other and somewhat less valid half of the reason is that I've never actually bothered to figure out how they work. :\
With no way to test them other than getting in-mission each time, I've not had much incentive to try either. That could easily change if you can indeed get them working (and maybe even editable?) in the ship lab though.

Anyway, I did some playing around with show ships flag and the new cockpit-texture. I found out that the HUD screen in many models seems to have some difficulties with being transparent. Also the reflections are kinda FUBAR, and my conclusion is that it's probably because for some reason, the sides of the HUD plate are not just two square polygons but instead consist of some triangles, of which some faces point to one way and some to another, and for example in case of Hercules figher, where the HUD is visible from upward angle, the HUD is transparent all right but also parts of the fighter's nose behind the HUD become transparent.

I don't know if this is a bug or a feature but it looks rather ugly... I can post screenshots if the matter needs clarifying.

Ugh, didn't think of the fact that the other HTL ships haven't been created with transparent HUDs in mind. That said though, if they were constructed correctly, the HUD should be smack bang over the reticle, making transparency somewhat important. Which ones suffer the worst?

Anyway, there are two easy solutions - either make the HUD part of the new tercoc01.dds opaque again and maybe raise the Zeus' eyepoint so you can see over it, or rename the new texture to something like "new_tercoc01.dds" and set the Zeus' model to use that one instead.

It'll mean two otherwise identical textures have to be kept in memory, but it'd fix the transparency issues on the older HTL models while retaining the propper look on the Zeus.

[taylor]

Oh - the insignia's being worked on code wise? Sweet, but you really gotta announce these things somewhere more obvious.

It's not the first time I've worked on them actually.  And I think the last time that I went through my plans for trying to improve the insignias, it was in an internal forum.  I have a really bad habit of doing things like that. 

But, yeah, they look better now.  They still require an PCX version, but a DDS version would actually be used if it exists.  This gives you some extra capabilities to make everything look nice.  Also, they are rendered with 25% transparency now, and I fixed the OpenGL code to allow it to blend properly (the insignia aren't actually blended though, it's sort of an alpha trick).  This does two things: 1) it blends just slightly with the textures underneath and looks better in general, and 2) the textures underneath have the lighting effects applied to them already so the insignia blending is actually able to take advantage of this and provide a nicer effect.

Well, half the reason I didn't include an insignia was because they'd always looked rather ugly to me - like a glowmap in some cases. The high poly ship hulls present a bit of a problem too. Surfaces that were once flat are sometimes now at least moderately greebled, either shrinking or forcing the insignias off alltogether .

Errm, the other and somewhat less valid half of the reason is that I've never actually bothered to figure out how they work. :\
With no way to test them other than getting in-mission each time, I've not had much incentive to try either. That could easily change if you can indeed get them working (and maybe even editable?) in the ship lab though.

Well, the insignia on the retail Zeus sucked balls anyway, so it's not that big of a loss in this case.  But, you get to improve on it if you want to and that can have good results.  Something like the Pegasus for instance, has a much better insignia layout on the HTL version than the retail version.  Not being a model maker I don't know exactly how to add them, but from the code I don't think it would be that big of a deal.  I don't remember if ModelView has the ability to mess with the insignia, but it might be something to add to my todo list if it doesn't.

For the Lab changes I have done a few minor things in preparation for my new set of builds:
 - added the ability to pan and zoom the model
 - made the ESC key exit the lab
 - added a "Show insignia" render option
 - made the "/" key cycle between all available insignia when "Show insignia" is enabled

That doesn't allow you to edit anything obviously, but it does allow you to quickly see what any insignia will look like on any model that supports them.  And the pan&zoom support makes sure that you can get a really good look at it too.

[Vasudan Admiral]

Oooh.... That sounds perfect!
Well - if you finish those features & builds off, I'll rebuild the Zeus with an insignia using them and put them on all future fighters.

Now to figure out exactly how to make em..... :\

[aldo_14]

Right, this started out as a small part of a side project for Goober, but grew into a full HTL job of the Zeus. I think I prefer doing capships, but that said, I'm most of the way through a HTL Valkyrie and Loki, and about halfway through a Centaur and Athena, so I'll probably be finishing those off before going back to the Arcadia. Have a look at this thread on Sectorgame for a few odd screenies.

Download - 3 megs

For the newbies, to install it simply extract the files using WinRAR, place the .pof file in Freespace2\mediavps\data\models, the .dds files in Freespace2\mediavps\data\maps and the .ibx file in Freespace2\mediavps\data\cache.

Piccy time!
(Please ignore the slight errors on the glowmaps. They've been fixed since. )
[]http://webzoom.freewebs.com/twisted-infinities-va/HTL%2DZeus/ZeusHTL%5FFinalPic2.jpg[/]

[]http://webzoom.freewebs.com/twisted-infinities-va/HTL%2DZeus/ZeusHTL%5FFinalPic1.jpg[/]

[]http://webzoom.freewebs.com/twisted-infinities-va/HTL%2DZeus/ZeusHTL%5FFinalPic4.jpg[/]

[]http://webzoom.freewebs.com/twisted-infinities-va/HTL%2DZeus/ZeusHTL%5FFinalPic5.jpg[/]


Also, if you use"show ship" in the table entry, you should get a view like this:
[]http://webzoom.freewebs.com/twisted-infinities-va/HTL%2DZeus/ZeusCockpitView.jpg[/]

However, it's entirely possible it will be a lot different and worse, because the current media VPs (specifically mv_models) have tga AND pcx versions of the old Tercoc01 map, both of which will override this set of new ones.
Note that this new set should be completely backwards compatible with all cockpits done with the old one - I just used the black space on the texture to add parts I needed for the higher detail cockpit.

So, DaBrain, would it be possible to make sure the new cockpit maps get into the next media VP set? Thanks.

Edit: Updated the newbie instructions.

3 thumbs up

Right, I'd better go put these thumbs back in the pickle jar.  Au revoir!

[Vasudan Admiral]

Oh so that's where my thumb ended up. All those months of not knowing.... well at least I have some closure now.

And thanks.

====================

Anyways, V1.1 is up now.
It's the same as 1.0 in every way except this one now has insignia in place, and is therefore vastly superior.     Download!

[karajorma]

*winces*

Freespace2\mediavps\data\* please. While FS2_Open wouldn't have problems with the other way it would crash out horribly or give you shards of death if you ever tried to run retail.

Righto. I'll stick that in. I don't actually use that setup myself, since my install is already all over the place and unbelievably messy.

Ever considered that why it's a mess