JB WIP thread: several ships

[maik]

Would love to be able to see them, but the link does not work for me (server not found) nor do I see anything but place holders in the post below:s

[jackiebean]

Would love to be able to see them, but the link does not work for me (server not found) nor do I see anything but place holders in the post below:s

not sure why, but i think maybe it has something to do with certain domains being blocked (for most likely silly reasons) by your own country. if that is the case, then using a VPN plugin for your browser may help. what it would do is mask your IP to that of originating from another country, and that way you can get around the issue. if it still doesnt help, then it might be the browser itself and how it handles URLs. make sure it is up to date, even if you use alternative browser or one based on older versions of a browser, they still have to try and keep up with coding so it works on the web.

other things to check are host files, or check to see if somehow there is browser hijacking going on where it redirects you to a false link. if you have a script blocker that may also contribute to not being able to view.

[Norby]

Use .cc instead of .org:

https://postimg.cc/gallery/pzt8854s/

The longer postimage.org is working also, just the postimg.org is not.

[jackiebean]

Use .cc instead of .org:

https://postimg.cc/gallery/pzt8854s/

The longer postimage.org is working also, just the postimg.org is not.

thanks norby! good call.

i need to PM you about the caduceus, something that montana is collaborating with me on. but since you maintain the oxp, then i would need to hand off the models to you.

also as a side note not related to images or the above, i have been reading a lot lately. The dark wheel, aftermath, and i found a guy on his own website making paper models of elite ships. From that mish mash of info i thought of several cool ideas to add to the ooniverse. one would be outside hull tethering (via an airlock, a simple cylinder textured and between the two ships) so one could actually tether a fighter to the outside of a larger ship. the other idea was to actually have shuttles and other ships be berthed inside larger cargo vessels. (not sure how to do that one visually but it was mentioned in aftermath) another idea is actually having subentities represent upgrades (got that from a cool drawing the paper modeler did of a sidewinder. upgrades included a fuel scoop, which is the same size for every vessel just placement of that would be the hard part, radar dish, and the ecm antenna. i am sure other upgrades could be added as subentities as well)

http://androidarts.com/elite/frontier.htm

now the stuff i just mentioned has kind of been an experiment in a way when it refers to what i was and am doing with the clippers oxp. i simply added subentities to the existing models griff did, such as clipper engines, and external fuel tanks. so experimenting with other upgrades plasterd to the outside of the hull would be easy in comparison. the fuel scoops could be an intersting one to work on, since i think those could be categorized in "sizes" so to speak, each type being more money than the last due to better efficiency, ability to process fuel faster etc.

external fuel tanks would have to be specific to each vessel since it relies largely on the shape of the hull and optimimum placement (take the boa for instance in the clipper version, i put the fuel tanks on the port and starboard cutouts griff had on the model) visually they are barely noticeable, but they do change the hull profile just slightly. the python clipper, on the other hand, had to have the external tanks on the outside of the hull rather visible, since there are no cutouts there to drop them into. so similarly on ships with smoother hulls, that would be the case as well.

also interestingly, the paper modeler seemed to notice that in the original elite, the ship dimensions were awfully inconsistent with their recorded sizes and cargo capacity. so i think the smarter move would be to break canon a bit and adjust the stats accordingly. that brings up a cargo bay extension idea. one idea (for larger vessels especially) would be to trade the support vessels in the hold for more cargo space, so if an anaconda was carrying a few worms, that would increase cargo space. the other idea, cargo bay expansion, would have to be done by subentities specific to the ship that was being modified. since i have done that as proof of concept with the external fuel tanks on the boa and python clippers in blender, it would be just as simple to model the cargo bay extensions for each ship.

the cool thing is that some of the subentities could also be existing models or rather modernized versions of those drops, things like navy radar, ecm arrays, special guns, and any other number of drops, as long as they would be visible on the outside of the hull. subentities like the phoenix rotor would still be inside the ship, as well as anything that would be installed inside a ship rather than on the hull.

just a thought and i will be working on that as well as the other stuff.

one thing i dont know if i agree with or not is paper modelers observation that rubbish should be in trash bags instead of neat cargo containers. i will think about that one.

[jackiebean]

small update, redoing the tiger trader, since my only point of reference for it was the charts i found online showing blue polygons. i misinterpreted the direction the hull faced, so i will probably make the first model i did into something else.

does anyone have any idea what the dimensions are supposed to be? i came up empty after looking at all the elite websites for data cards or ship reviews, but did find a nice picture with the textures so i was able to determine it has two engines and orientation similar to the asp or cobra, and got a few greeble hints based on that and other sources. however at 240 TC minus the drive, it seems to be a bit larger than the Boa series, making it a decent competitor for a trader character ship. this info is critical since it determines the scale of the fuselage, but also the cockpit. now the one page i found said the top greeble on the old model from frontier was supposed to be a turret base, but i am not sure if it is or not, and it lists 3 guns maximum, but also says there can be more added (contradictory statement?)

as of now i have the top greeble formed into a cockpit, so the shape is remeniscent of some of the old submersibles (a very slim resemblance) but if there are any better pictures around then it could change where the cockpit will be palced or if there is any external viewports at all.





any help on this would be appreciated.

and as an aside, i will probably be redoing a lot of the navy ships i have not even shown yet. or maybe i have but dont remember. anyway, since i failed to read the wiki first, and finally really went into it for the navy ships thet ADCK intorduced, i found out that the transport was actually a heavily modified anaconda, the moray starboat is also modified, and the minesweeper was a modified viper cruiser, so those models will be replaced with modified griff models to reflect some kind of difference between standard tech and the navy upgrades.

i will also redo the frigate for the 3rd time around, sicne i did not get the same satisfaction on that model as i have on some of the other stuff.

the big question is what is the backstory for the navy destroyer? and what if any ship is it based on? that will determine if i keep my second version of that model or not. but i will however try to retain the rail gun model i cooked up, since it is pretty cool as it is. right now it kind of looks like a weird cross between tie fighter and star destroyer with a big gun in the middle of the hull slung under the main bridge, but i kind of want to get away from that kind of design a bit, i think it could be pulled off to fit the OOniverse, but i really am trying to stay as far away from any other sci fi universe designs as possible. if nobody has an answer i do have a model that i can recycle as the destroyer, but it will lose some of the railgun geometry in the process, basically it has to do with the lave academy expansion oxp project, and the destroyer converted to a light carrier in that one. i could graft the muzzle in and be done with it. that model fits a lot better into the OOniverse than the first and second destroyers i made.

[Disembodied]

The Frontier manual doesn't give dimensions, but it does give figures for mass and internal capacity. The Tiger Trader is listed as:

Hull mass: 80 tonnes
Mass (fully laden): 400 tonnes
Internal capacity (no drive): 320 tonnes

The figures for the Python are:

Hull mass: 100 tonnes
Mass (fully laden): 500 tonnes
Internal capacity (no drive): 400 tonnes

and for the Boa:

Hull mass: 200 tonnes
Mass (fully laden): 1500 tonnes
Internal capacity (no drive): 1300 tonnes

If we take the Cobra III as the measure of all things, the Frontier figures are:

Hull mass: 20 tonnes
Mass (fully laden): 100 tonnes
Internal capacity (no drive): 80 tonnes

So a Tiger Trader is four times bigger than a Cobra III, and around one-third the size of a Boa … how this scales out in Oolite terms, I don't know! But it looks like the Tiger Trader is supposed to be bigger than a Cobra III and smaller than a Python.

[jackiebean]

ok, that is where scaling is an issue, because even with the source files from griff, importing the objects together reveals they are not to scale as assumed. and this is what a lot of people have mentioned previously about scaling issues in OOlite and even in the original games.

now granted, the tiger trader i built was already scaled pretty closely to what you mentioned in regards to the cobra3, but compared to the Boa or Python, either one of those is built smaller than it should be when i import them to blender, however i am not sure if the scripting or a separate oxp has fixed the scaling in game or it has to be done on an individual basis by the end user.



i think there are two categories of griff models we see here, and one is fighter scale, which all fighters seem to be scaled relative to each other, and the larger ships scale since they seem to be in scale relative to each other (im guessing at that just from observation, however i could be wrong)

usually i try to keep any new models scaled relative to their particular category, so they may not be scaled correctly for direct import to the game. since i have not set up measurements to my own specs in blender and they are set to default, i may have to scale up a lot of the original griff models manually in blender to approximate their given dimensions. this would help a lot before final release of anything at all.

i think griff solves some of the problems with scaling by texture as well, and it seems the larger ships have either got larger textures, or they are irregular size, as in twice as wide as the standard, although i am not as proficient in blender to figure out how that was accomplished since usually it expects a square texture and not rectangular. but anyway it stands to reason that larger textures mean more detail, and thus they can be scaled larger and not lose detail up close (like the coriolis did before it was final)

if i can copy each wiki page of the standard ships, then i can attempt to scale up the imported models one by one until they are pretty close to what they should be, and then use those as a baseline for the stuff i already created.

it is funny how issues with one single ship can possibly effect everything else, but i dont mind. better to think of it now than regret it after release.

luckily my new modeling method is much more "modular" (?) since it relies largely on making details/greebles that float on the surface of the main hull, so critical details like the cockpit can be replaced if they do not look to scale any more once they get resized. i used to like making models as one piece, but later realized texturing them is not as easy to do unless they are literally broken into manageable pieces. trying to maximize the space used in a texture makes a huge difference in game. too much unused space leads to a lot of pixelization, or low resolution even on a larger texture space. unfortunately there is no easy way to unwrap in blender so sometimes (often) i have to take each piece and unwrap it individually or mirrored and then pack the islands by hand. if i let blender do it it does not recognize the islands or work i did to weld things together and i end up with a mess i have to sort out all over again, so i just do it by hand. that is the hardest part of the modeling end of things. tedious. unless someone knows a few tricks i dont know of yet.

anyway, thanks for the info Disembodied. I guess i better go grab as much of the wiki as i can.

[jackiebean]

ok, been kinda busy with other things lately, but i did manage to import and convert some of griffs stuff into blender files where i set up the measurements in metric, and they seem to be pretty close to, well close enough, to actual listed dimensions in the wiki. so far anyway. since i used an older version of the asp model as the basis for the tiger trader, and then heavily edited it into what it is now, there is no way to know for sure what the dimensions were of the model in the original game unless i can dig into the provided files i found on a website (coding stuff mainly) and somehow find the dimensions of the ship there. comparing game files from the original games and the oolite build, it seems that a lot of the original structure was carried over into oolite. maybe not the same identical scripting methods, but the information is pretty darn close. so i will be looking around in the files i found, i think it was labeled elite objects (which gives a lot of the same data as found in oolite dat files) and hopefully there is an entry there for the tiger trader somewhere. not sure how fruitful that will be but that seems to be my only solid lead right now. i could wing it but since griffs models are pretty close to precise, i kind of want to make the model as close as i can to original dimensions. since the cargo space depends on cubic measurement instead of the visual size of the ship, it probably would not be close enough if i eyeball it.

if anyone knows a way to convert the original tiger trader object into an actual wavefront object, if that even exists, then i am all ears.

edit: did a search for 3d models from FFE or similar and came up with FFE3d and am using Lithunwrap to try and export them to obj format. hopefully they are all just direct copies of the original game models instead of modernized. the thing is that the models are numbered and not named, so to figure out what they are i have to import those to blender 1x1 and then figure out what they are based on the shape. this could take a while. the upshot is i can then scale them based on the cobra and they should come out to their actual size. the idea is to import the FFE cobra into the file containing the oolite cobra, then upscale the FFE cobra and delete the oolite cobra, then make the FFE cobra a wire mesh only. import both a second FFE cobra and whatever other model. upscale both until the cobra is matching the wireframe already upscaled, and et viola! convoluted i know, and i hate convoluted. i guess i may be able to get other models too like some of the stations and buildings (crossing fingers) with textures! that will give me a good idea of what the building and station models have a potential to look like. can anyone go for a frontiers stations OXP?

edit again: well, no luck. all new models in a similar vein to the prototype boa or the black monks ships (and a few other ships from oxps) but nothing even resembling the original low poly models except a few rare examples. in some cases it is hard to tell what they are supposed to be because of the radical difference between the original models and the new ones, so i think they are cool to look at but since i am going more toward the most recent oolite core models, i better find some other way to get the dimensions. back to the drawing board.

edit once again: well, after scouriung the web for a long time, i finally found a link to a french elite site related to elite dangerous, but in one post they actually had a scale chart for frontier elite 2, and the scale of the tiger trader is about twice as wide as the transporter. so that settles it. and as a bonus now i can accurately scale the other ships from the frontier games. back to business.

[jackiebean]

here is the image, and as i thought, the scaling for the large vessels is in a different category from the smaller ships. so i have scaled the tiger trader with respect to the transporter, the python, and the boa. of course now this means the cobramk3 is giant compared to this chart.

i am not sure how it was done in the original games, but in frontier and FFE it seems they left out the dimensions and strictly went with mass. so this may be someone attempting to scale according to mass or logical mass based on the type of ship and its role.

according to this chart the panther clipper is going to be roughly 4x as big as the transporter. the imp trader and courier are almost as wide as the tiger trader. interesting.

[montana05]

and as an aside, i will probably be redoing a lot of the navy ships i have not even shown yet. or maybe i have but dont remember. anyway, since i failed to read the wiki first, and finally really went into it for the navy ships thet ADCK intorduced, i found out that the transport was actually a heavily modified anaconda, the moray starboat is also modified, and the minesweeper was a modified viper cruiser, so those models will be replaced with modified griff models to reflect some kind of difference between standard tech and the navy upgrades.

i will also redo the frigate for the 3rd time around, sicne i did not get the same satisfaction on that model as i have on some of the other stuff.

the big question is what is the backstory for the navy destroyer? and what if any ship is it based on? that will determine if i keep my second version of that model or not. but i will however try to retain the rail gun model i cooked up, since it is pretty cool as it is. right now it kind of looks like a weird cross between tie fighter and star destroyer with a big gun in the middle of the hull slung under the main bridge, but i kind of want to get away from that kind of design a bit, i think it could be pulled off to fit the OOniverse, but i really am trying to stay as far away from any other sci fi universe designs as possible. if nobody has an answer i do have a model that i can recycle as the destroyer, but it will lose some of the railgun geometry in the process, basically it has to do with the lave academy expansion oxp project, and the destroyer converted to a light carrier in that one. i could graft the muzzle in and be done with it. that model fits a lot better into the OOniverse than the first and second destroyers i made.

Most ships of the Galactic Navy and the Behemoth escorts are based on the Neolite designs of SimonB:

http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Neolite_Ships

I did some research myself but wasn't able to find any background-stories for the Navy Light Destroyer and the Navy Destroyer, however, from the dimensions and mass the Navy Destroyer is more like a battleship or Light Carrier than a destroyer so, in my opinion, a modification would be an improvement.

[jackiebean]

ok, heres the mothball destroyer by itself and in the new updated and expanded lave academy complex in two separate pics.

i think the shape fits well with both the light destroyer and the navy class carrier, since the other behemoth carriers are mostly designed to fit those lines.

[jackiebean]

ok from the above pics if you notice the small dark blip in front of one of the docking ports on the station proper, that is an anaconda. looks like a flea compared to the rest.

put that in perspective and the destroyer is a pretty big ship in its own right. the idea is that it was a destroyer with its gun removed and then refitted into one of the first carriers that could house more than a few ships. it can fit a couple of wings, and the turrets have not been shown because they are not built yet.

compared to the behemoth size carriers it is slightly smaller, but those can carry quite a lot more ships.

the behemoths are actually in the gallery a page or two back.

now if i put the actual rail gun (or whatever gun it is) in the nose of this destroyer, it takes on a whole different look.

i will post a comparison of that idea and the other version i had in mind.




both of them have a huge gun with a rotating shroud, but that detail has to be worked out at a later time. i want the particle effects to be like lightning and the shroud to spin up and then fire with a massive energy burst (within the limits of the game engine i suppose) but that animation is not something i can do on the model side of things. that will mean the main gun will have a slow refire rate.

the older destroyer model i made is a lot smaller than the new one, and it is closer to the scale of the original adck destroyer, i just want to stay away from looking like another franchise. since the larger model looks more like something from the elite universe i will probably just go with it.

the other ships will be modified griff models. since i only have models i did before i found out what they were supposed to be, it is probably not worth showing them.

[jackiebean]

ok, short update. i finally got dropbox set up, amidst a bunch of other software and hardware issues. I had to set up camera surveillance on my place to prevent theift, which is a reason for me to move soon. Once i have one of the model upgrades finished and textured to completion, it will be uploaded to dropbox for other devs to have access to so the scripting and playtesting can be done.

the files will not be hosted forever though, so once they have been handed off and then finalized by others, and put up as a working oxp, i will remove them from dropbox, in turn, to save valuable space.

sorry, no pretty pics just yet.

i suppose i can hand off the new models for some of the smaller oxps i have finished (like thargoid gates) but that would then be up to the maintaner to carry it through.

[montana05]

Just curious, what happened to this project ? I remember that a lot great models were involved.

[jackiebean]

I just recently got reliable internet again. It's been a frustrating two years of craziness and when i finally updated linux i found out that blender nerfed support for OGL 3 in favor of OGL 4 so blender just stopped working! So until i figure out a work around, it will be some time until i can get more models finished. Sorry for all the delays. The project is not dead, just a little detained. Looking for the handcuff keys.