[Scooby_Doo]

Minor nitpick, Scooby. Note that your mainwheels will bear most of the fighter's weight when on the ground, so they tend to be larger than your nosewheels or tailwheels (should you have such). It may be due to perspective, but your mainwheel trucks seem to be bearing smaller slicks than that of the nosewheel truck. And even though you have four slicks in total at the aft of the fighter, you also have a far higher concentration of weight as well. You may want to get some larger diameter slicks back there...

I think it's the perspective, they're the same size.  Also these will be generic gears, it'll depend on the shape of the craft which gears will be used

[Scooby_Doo]

Couple (or so) more features...
Radar/sensor thingie - encased in protective glass, it's location will vary from ship to ship (some on the nose, some on the wings, some with one, some with two...etc..)  Requires chopping lod 0 up and some retexturing


Physically vents (not normal mapped low quality) just add more objects to lod 0, no other changes need to be made (they get removed in lod 1 and replaced with just the texture version)


Refuellers - Same as the vents



Anyone have any other ideas?

[Dragon]

RCS nozzles. I'll tell you how to set them up so they actually fire. Just put them on the model, and I'll show you how to table them.

[Scooby_Doo]

Just had a scarey thought.... when you rotate a subsystem does it rotate around it's local axis or the worlds?  Local axis is a lot better than world.

[Luis Dias]

what do you mean, "world's"? Dat doesnt even

[headdie]

iirc it all rotates around the local, if it was mission space then things like the radar dishes on the Orions and Fenris/Leviathon wouldn't work

[Scooby_Doo]

iirc it all rotates around the local, if it was mission space then things like the radar dishes on the Orions and Fenris/Leviathon wouldn't work

Makes sense, also that would make off-angled doors and stuff nearly impossible to do correctly.

what do you mean, "world's"? Dat doesnt even

Local space = rotate around the subsystems x/y/z axis
world space = rotate around the games x/y/z axis

for example: Take a rotate radar that rotates clockwise, we then rotate the subobject 90 degrees pointing due port (0,90,0)   Now in local space coords, the top of the dish would still be angled at (0,0,0), and it would still be rotating clockwise.  In world coords, the top of the dish would be (0,90,0) and would be rotating top to bottom to top.  It's all relative.

edit: Same goes for moving/scalling.  In local space the scale is ALWAYS 100% and the objects center/origin is ALWAYS (0,0,0)

[Dragon]

Well, if you mean like that (I'd rather use "ship space", since "world space" implies global coordinates for the entire mission), then AFAIK it'd be world's axis. Basically, if you define a model to rotate on Y-axis, then it'll rotate around the ship's Y-axis (i.e. top-down direction relative to the ship), no matter how you twist or transform the submodel itself. Yes, this does make off-axis doors and other animations hard to set up, and that's why there's so few of them. You have to express the rotation you want as a sum of two rotations around different axes. For simple angles like 30, 45 and 60 degrees this should be easy, for others might be less so, but it pretty much all boils down to high school level maths at most.

[lostllama]

Is it possible to make telescoping landing gear work in the FSO engine? Specifically, I'm thinking of a landing gear strut that swings down in an arc and also extends as it does so (and shortens as it retracts), like a piston. I know translation isn't possible and that with some work it can be "faked" using a pivot point placed far away from the object. What I'm also not certain about is whether such an object can have two animations.

Taking this piston idea further, what about the implementation of landing gear suspension effects?

I might be better off looking this up elsewhere rather than asking here, but these are some ideas that I hope others might like to see working.

[Scooby_Doo]

Hmmm is rotation mostly limited to the local Z axis?  I can't seem to get Y axis rotation to do anything and X seems to be the same as the Z's rotation.

[Nuke]

in situations where you have a long chain of child objects in a heirarchical arrangement the children at the deepest level are transformed first, then their parents (and all its children) until the root object is reached. so children get rotated by their own rotations, then inherit their parents rotations, and their grandparents rotations, etc (but instance depth maxes out at like 5 or something so it cant be too deep). ive had situations where parent rotations cancel out child rotations. with a 3 deep system you can easily accomplish translation. getting it to work and keeping collision detection for those children working is another matter entirely (at any given time a parents bounding box needs to contain all its children, if an animation makes a child leave the bounding box, then that child will probibly have collision issues, and this needs to be done at every level of heirarchy including the parent, and the model radius must contain the root objects box, in theory).

[Scooby_Doo]

RCS nozzles. I'll tell you how to set them up so they actually fire. Just put them on the model, and I'll show you how to table them.

Done

About 54,000 polys, 37k without the landing gears

[Dragon]

Excellent. Can't wait to see it released. Once you get it in-game, I'll send you a table with the thrusters set up, with instruction for implementing them on other ships. Unless you have a different effect in mind, I'll use the RCS puff from BTRL (the same one was used in Diaspora). BTW, this can work on capships, too (maybe with a different effect though).

[Scooby_Doo]

Excellent. Can't wait to see it released. Once you get it in-game, I'll send you a table with the thrusters set up, with instruction for implementing them on other ships. Unless you have a different effect in mind, I'll use the RCS puff from BTRL (the same one was used in Diaspora). BTW, this can work on capships, too (maybe with a different effect though).

Are the thrusters based on a pof data entry? (i.e. are they setup the same way as regular thrusters?)

[Dragon]

Nope, they're table only. You don't need to add anything to POF to use them.

[Scooby_Doo]

Nope, they're table only. You don't need to add anything to POF to use them.

Oh man, that could be more difficult then.

[Dragon]

Just use glowpoints for taking the thruster's exact position and normal. It's not that hard, if a bit tedious.

[Scooby_Doo]

Ahhhh.... that'll work I think.

[Scooby_Doo]

Some updates to this very old thread...

These are all lod 0 details, lod 1 and down have no changes..



New texturing style... (no bump yet)

[Mongoose]

Kinda looks like a beefy F-22 Raptor.