[Flipside]

Fascinating videos, thanks for those

[yuezhi]

right, i forgot all about inertia.

i've been a bit misinformed since my only source of 0G science was from Tintin. on second thought, water flying out of a cup seemingly by magic has a flaw.

[z64555]

Oui, [hic] That taint be water outta that cup. [hic] THat be meh-dee-call spirits!

[Nuke]

i kinda did this for all my cockpitted ships. lined em up in fred and compared the size of the cockpit interior (i still havent gotten around to modeling a human in a pirate flight suit). i tried for the most part to be consistant, but some discrepency still remains on a few ships. i even went as far as having my sister measure my dimentions in a seated position, granted most pilots would be much smaller than me, but it gave me a rough approximation of how bit to make a ship's interior. i also want to redesign most of the cockpits, with low poly ship integrated cockpits and standalone hi-poly cockpits. its on my todo list right under htl everything.

[BlasterNT]

what are the advantages of having high poly standalone cockpits vs. just having integrated cockpits?

[Klaustrophobia]

working ejection system?

[General Battuta]

what are the advantages of having high poly standalone cockpits vs. just having integrated cockpits?

A high poly standalone cockpit can be enabled in first person view so that the player can actually see it when flying the ship. Then you can use the low poly cockpit on other ships of the same class to avoid a performance hit. Detail boxes might also enable this, I dunno.

[z64555]

what are the advantages of having high poly standalone cockpits vs. just having integrated cockpits?

A high poly standalone cockpit can be enabled in first person view so that the player can actually see it when flying the ship. Then you can use the low poly cockpit on other ships of the same class to avoid a performance hit. Detail boxes might also enable this, I dunno.

Detail boxes would work beautifully for this sort of thing.

[Nuke]

my original reasons for selecting the show ship method were fairly simple. i liked to mont gatling guns forward of the cockpit so you could see them spin about when firing. to give the impression that your flying a machine instead of just a camera floating around in space. then i wrote scripts for control animations, so you could watch the cockpit controls move in reaction to your inputs. this involved a subsystem handle which is not available in the cockpit models which were implemented later on. i argued against the deprecation of the show ship flag for this reason. then i developed rtt code which required some texture replacement, and at the time there were no texture handles for cockpit models. i believe these limitations have been overcome since then, in one way or another. you can also now render objects on top of the cockpit model, this allows better animation (like translations) inside the cockpit. switching over to the "more efficient" method is now plausible and desirable and will probibly be done when i find the mood for modding.

detail boxes in this case, i think, is kind of a misuse of the feature. a low poly cockpit can have lods, and these lods can be adjusted to best align with the ship model at each detail levels.

[BlasterNT]

So does using standalone models still allow you to see external weapons in first person view?

[rscaper1070]

If they're modeled in, sure. Hell, you can have a naked hula lady on the dash if you model it.

[BlasterNT]

Well, I mean would those models still be dynamic.  Ie, respond to animation code, and be swapped in an out dependent on weapon. 

[Mongoose]

If they're modeled in, sure. Hell, you can have a naked hula lady on the dash if you model it.

I now demand this for every cockpit.

[z64555]

detail boxes in this case, i think, is kind of a misuse of the feature. a low poly cockpit can have lods, and these lods can be adjusted to best align with the ship model at each detail levels.

I disagree on the misuse bit, you can have a detail box of the cockpit per LOD.

If your really ambitious, you can use detail boxes for sub-levels of detail. I think this would be only really useful for large warships and installations, however.

[Nuke]

So does using standalone models still allow you to see external weapons in first person view?

not sure, but this is something i could probibly hack in with scripting.

[Nuke]

detail boxes in this case, i think, is kind of a misuse of the feature. a low poly cockpit can have lods, and these lods can be adjusted to best align with the ship model at each detail levels.

I disagree on the misuse bit, you can have a detail box of the cockpit per LOD.

If your really ambitious, you can use detail boxes for sub-levels of detail. I think this would be only really useful for large warships and installations, however.

you could still throw in detail bits into the first cockpit lod, but i wouldnt use the detail box as like lod -1, for example. mainly because lod0 will still be drawn. this could lead to some ugly overlap. it would be ok if you want to add 3d buttons and knobs on top of a flat control panel, which would otherwise just be part of the texture. detail boxes should accentuate whatever lod is currently being drawn, not replace it, was the main point i was getting at.

[z64555]

...If your really ambitious, you can use detail boxes for sub-levels of detail. I think this would be only really useful for large warships and installations, however.

...detail boxes should accentuate whatever lod is currently being drawn, not replace it, was the main point i was getting at.

That's what I meant by sub-lod's... they don't replace the entire ship, just something relatively small like a comms dish or another subsystem