[LeGuille]

Shattered Steel was released in 1996 by BioWare. It was a mimic to the Mech Commander series, and was pretty limited. But it was also one of the FIRST games to have destructable terrain.

The reason I bring this game to question is that in FreeSpace2, there has never really been any working models of Humans, Mechs, etc. It interests me on how easy is it to make a person with a skybox, a few tables defining some walls, etc, and make that part of FreeSpace2_Open? The reason I ask is because with advanced ideas of the FS2_Open engine and SCP's awesome efforts, the game is far beyond what or Interplay could have ever hoped for.

So: What can one do if they wanted to make a human model able to move around, like any other 3D game? Would there have to be of editing done to prevent Y movement? Or even Mech units able to move thier legs independant of the other parts, and still function.

We have seen many mods make use of the feature for pilots to be able to use inertia to move one direction and face the other. We have seen definitions for independant sub-systems to rotate independantly of the ship.

So can we make legs and arms, and make them move independantly? Or is this fruitless without heavy heavy modification to the actualy core of FS2_Open?

[Colonol Dekker]

Fruitless without a different engine entirely.

[Turnsky]

Fruitless without a different engine entirely.

indeed, i don't think the FS2 engine's capable of articulation of such a high degree, that's practically skeletal modeling right there, if memory serves.

[Galemp]

Yeah, this is far beyond the scope of the FSO engine. It was never designed for such things.

[Getter Robo G]

While unit animation is possible, no one else has released a gravity fix publicly. (They merely talked about it and released a single screenshot long ago).

For all the work that would need to go into it to make just the basics would be staggering. Honestly it would be more sane to get a newer engine with those capabilities directly supported and alter existing mods for games mech/FPS related.

Right now mechs are just ships, static. had the gravity thing worked out things might have been a little better but for now (people were thinking tanks not mechs) anything like that is a dead end.



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[JGZinv]

Nuke talked about scripting the actions of the arms and so forth and said it was possible,
just it'd be a huge undertaking.

Have to look up my old physical weapons thread to get into it again.

Otherwise... best you could probably do would be to have a FS2 landing at a base - to a cutscene - to
a background launch of a open source mech sim with a FS2 skinned initerface - to a drop pod cutscene -
to a auto launch into a mech mission.

Then do the whole thing in reverse for when you want to return to a ship.

[redsniper]

Actually, I'm pretty sure this is on the SCP roadmap as a post-3.7 thing.

[Nuke]

Nuke talked about scripting the actions of the arms and so forth and said it was possible,
just it'd be a huge undertaking.

Have to look up my old physical weapons thread to get into it again.

Otherwise... best you could probably do would be to have a FS2 landing at a base - to a cutscene - to
a background launch of a open source mech sim with a FS2 skinned initerface - to a drop pod cutscene -
to a auto launch into a mech mission.

Then do the whole thing in reverse for when you want to return to a ship.

from what i know an ik based system could be scripted quite easily, but what youd need beyond that is scriptable colision detection and better physics handeling and modification capabilities. so far all my attempts at physics modification break collision code. but what you need to do is figure out where the foot of the mech will land, then use ik math to determine the rotations of all the joints. then you can animate the whole system. physics can then be calulated. of course the scripting system has changed so im not even sure i understand it anymore.

[Commander Zane]

This is why Starsiege 2845 should've just been finished instead of ganked.