[Vasudan Admiral]

Oops, forgot to stagger the barrels:

[Trivial Psychic]

Not to dis this, but we've been seeing a lot of comparison shots to the original Orion, but none comparing it to the current up-detailed one.  Any chance of such images?

[headdie]

Stunning work VA

[Dragon]

Looks good. Are you going to make a single-barrel beam version?

[Aesaar]

Preferred the unstaggered barrels, but it still looks pretty awesome.

[Hades]

Looks good. Are you going to make a single-barrel beam version?

No.

[Droid803]

Too bad those only fire derpy THT's

[sigtau]

But now it's derpy in HD.

[LordPomposity]

Looks absolutely beautiful. I have one (very minor) criticism:



The contrast between the heavily smoothed purple section and the ninety-degree angle of the orange section comes across to me as rather jarring. I suggest that you bevel the orange line.

[Hades]

It already has been done.

[Enioch]

Hey, Hades, just one question. About those turrets... 

These 'pistons', on the underside. I hate to be a kill-joy, but how on earth are you going to get them to rotate and follow the elevation angle of the barrels?

Don't hurt me if it's obvious, lads.

[Vasudan Admiral]

If you look carefully at the overly loud docking arms, you can see that pistons do indeed now work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW5X8obIIGw

(The ship is the Orestes repair tug from Twisted Infinities). Basically I just recently put Bobboau's old "look_at:" feature back into the code (haven't committed it to trunk yet though), and it works beautifully!! So, I decided to make use of it in the Orion turrets. You just specify an axis of rotation using the usual radio buttons, and also put "look_at:#" in the subobject properties of the subobject in question, where # is the number of the subobject you want it to always try and point at. For pistons you just point the base and arm at each other and connect them to other moving subobjects, and they should work everywhere! It's surprisingly easy and adds so much awesome sauce to moving subobjects.

Oh also, I sorta got the animated subobject sounds working too, but I need to get Goob to have a look over my code to see if there's a better way of doing it.

[Fury]

That's impressive, VA!

[Enioch]

-explanation-

Oh. 

OH!   

.....gllhkdfjje......

(Runs off to design awesome looking animated parts)

Seriously. That changes...a lot of things. When can we expect it in a build?

Edit: on second thought, does that still work on turrets, (i.e., have you tested it on turrets)? I am unfamiliar with the parenting code (as with any code), so I might be wrong, but I don't think that you can assign a turret barrel as a subsystem parent. And how about the parenting 'tree' depth, or whatever it's called - I thought you could only get five levels, including detail0. Wouldn't that break this, under certain circumstances?

[Vasudan Admiral]

That's the beauty of it - it's for submodels, but they don't have to be subsystems. I haven't tested it for turrets, but in the past i've mounted a spinning disc to a turret arm (ie base -> arm -> disc) and that rotation worked fine, so chances are it does for turrets too.

You're correct that the max depth is 5 (though in my build i set it to...7 i think?) and haven't had problems so far. Also under normal use, you shouldn't hit 5 even. ie: Hull -> base -> arm -> cylinder arm, so yeah hopefully that won't be a problem either.

As for a build ETA, errm, a little while due to general busyness, but don't worry, it will come about!
Also, Goober and I have been revamping the docking animation code, which is rather more awesome now! Goob also made a SEXP trigger for animations which i'm sure will be ridiculously useful down the track when we have more animation capable ships around.

[Woolie Wool]

We are of course also paying attention to the disparity of loadouts between FS1 and FS2 and we will hopefully coming up with a modeled Turrets system that will suffice for both.

Fortunately, it only really focuses on 8 out of the 16 Turrets that we have to really worry about from a Canon perspective. This of course won't address any additional campaigns going crazy on their loadouts.

So far, between FS1 and FS2 (counting ST and ST:R) the only turrets on the Orion that situate both Turrets and Beams are: 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 14, 16. The rest of the loadout swapping is having Flak in some spots in the first 5 multi-part/multi-barrel spots, but those can share nicely enough. Otherwise it's all variations of the same type (Weak vs Standard, AAAf vs AAAh).

If there are any high standing campaigns that sport different configurations in terms of Turrets/Flak vs Beams or that are sporting additional non-Retail turret placements, I'd personally like to hear of it. No guarantee's that we will make any concessions in trying to adapt or implement them in the new model, but at the least if we don't/can't there will be a heads-up regarding it.

The Orion in Twist of Fate has railguns where the big anticap beams in FS2 are situated but the beam submodels would probably suffice for them unless they were too obviously pew-pew ray guns.

[Enioch]

Also, Goober and I have been revamping the docking animation code,which is rather more awesome now!

This also sounds interesting. Can you elaborate?

Goob also made a SEXP trigger for animations which i'm sure will be ridiculously useful down the track when we have more animation capable ships around.

Why the SEXP? Can't you use script-eval in-mission to trigger a scripted animation? What does the new SEXP offer? Does it address the fact that, by using script-eval you trigger each and every one of the 'scripted' animations in the model?

Oh, and sorry about the thread hijack. Split, maybe?

[Nyctaeus]

I love this turrets, they're just awesome !

[-Norbert-]

Overall the turrets look great, but I don't like that the outer two barrels are sloped (not sure if it's the right word... but you get the idea I hope). Wouldn't such a barrel shape reduce the acuracy of the shots?

[headdie]

thing is if you look thats how the original barrels are shaped