[Turambar]

cranked this out this evening.



taking a short corvette break.

[brandx0]

Very nice, I think the lasers perhaps look a little thick, however.  Other than that, very nice

[jr2]

Impressive!

[chief1983]

I'm amazed that you cranked that out in one night, you're really gotten comfortable with modeling quickly it seems.  I guess that corvette was good practice.  I can't wait to see it textured.

[Black Wolf]

Impressive!

Most Impressive.

[Turambar]

[Topgun]

I don't think we should do the x-wing until we figure out what to do with those s-foils...

[chief1983]

Hopefully he's just leaving them as subobjects for now.  That's probably all that would be necessary for any animation code.  Either way, there's nothing too special to take into account.  The B-Wing is the one that would be a problem.

[Topgun]

the b-wing will most probable have locked s-foils. I doubt that we will have a moving eyepoint any time soon.

[Vasudan Admiral]

Why would the B-Wing be a problem? Why would you need a moving eyepoint? There's a huge range of possibilities for animation/triggers you could use there.
Whatever behaviour you want the B-Wing to exhibit, chances are it's perfectly doable with the features available.

[chief1983]

If you don't move the eyepoint, you have moving firing points, which aren't directly supported by the engine currently.  If you don't move the firepoints, you have a rotating viewpoint.  Depending on what is considered staying still and what's not,  you have something moving that just simply isn't easily done in the engine currently, to my knowledge.  Maybe some scripting could do it, or maybe there's a way I don't know about, but as far as I can tell it's not a simple one to do.  The X-Wing though, only needs animations, since supposedly it can only fire its blasters in attack position.  So you'd just disable them in closed position instead of move them.

[Cyker]

IIRC, the B-Wing can also only fire its weapons in S-foils open mode too.

This is certainly the case in X-Wing: B-Wing, XvT and XWA...

[chief1983]

I think the S-Foils can open and close independent of the cockpit orientation.  At least that's what I've seen portrayed before.

[Vasudan Admiral]

If you don't move the eyepoint, you have moving firing points, which aren't directly supported by the engine currently.

I seem to recall that moving firepoints (ie, associated with a parent subobject) were supported at some point in FSO. Could be wrong though, since it would have been a long time ago and I wouldn't have had any need for it.
However, you should still be able to achieve this through scripting - instead of a standard gunpoint, have a forward facing turret scripted to fire whenever the trigger is pressed or something similar. There are definitely ways to do it.

What exactly do you want the B-Wing to do in-game though? How do you want it to fly? By the sounds of it, you want the body to spin around the cockpit when it banks, while still being able to fire and keeping the cockpit level. There are ways to do that, but you may find it won't be worth the effort.
Personally I think it'd be better off with just two positions - attack and cruise just like the X-Wing. You start in cruise mode where the B-Wings S-foils are closed and the body is orientated horizontally out to one side (firing disabled). Then when a button is pressed to switch to attack position, the S-foils open up while the body rotates down into the vertical position.

This will save you and the pilots many a nightmare when it comes to things like convergence, since you'll both only have to deal with the weapons fire coming from one weird position rather than anywhere in the full 360° rotation area.

[chief1983]

For the B-Wing, it doesn't need to be that crazy, I just mean that there are two things that can be done with it:  The S-Foils can be changed from open to closed, and the body, or the main wing, can be rotated around the cockpit to one of two positions.  Banking has nothing to do with it, either of those would be a player controlled operation just like on the X-Wing.  It could be done so that there are only two options, but it still requires moving firepoints.  I'm just saying that neither one is incredibly simple, and will probably currently require at least a minimal amount of scripting to do.  However, that aside, there's nothing wrong with doing the X-Wing at least right now, since its S-Foils should be much easier to deal with, and making the model doesn't require anything special other than leaving the wings as subobjects, and making sure there is a full mesh underneath them.

[jr2]

As you can see, the nose thingy is a little off.  No biggie.  Plus, the convergence between the cockpit and where r2 is installed is a little off, should be recessed in the center, but almost the same height as the cockpit on the sides.  And the lasers seem as if they should be fitted on rather thin pylons (or whatever you call them), and a bit closer to the S-Foils.  Ah, but it looks very good, yes, very good indeed. 

[Scourge of Ages]

Urge...to...watch...Ep. 4...

[jr2]

Bwahahahahaha!

[Topgun]

Urge...to...watch...Ep. 4...

EP. 5 and 6 are so much better... EP.4 was cheap, just look at the props.

[Cyker]

Battle of Endor FTW

Don't worry too much about the X-Wing's accuracy - Even the film models are not totally consistant, and lots of the kit models have the recessed-lower R2 area rather than having it flush as in the above piccys.

The games have it flush, but this is for obvious reasons (Less polys )