Page 13 of 160

Posted: Tue Nov 24, 2009 12:24 pm
by Simon B
While I was waiting, I reworked that mamba...
Image
... its a bit snub-nosed, but the point at the end is so thin anyway, and this has fewer polys. Doubling the engines gives the meatier look but increases the poly count mightily. However, I dispair not as I have seen griffs moray.

Each engine has 203 polys - before tesselation.
The body has 134, again, before tesselation.
Total count is 584 incl the gun... after tesselating, this comes to 1072 triangles all up. Is this a worry: the mamba is one of the ships we see a fair bit of?

I also cobbled together some decals for people to use...
Image
(click to enlarge)

The skull comes from the jolly-roger that seems to be everywhere - the one with the swords wot decorates the python blackdog. The circle with the arrows you'll recognise as the stormbringer symbol. More of a literary reference for the cerebral pirates. A cadeucus, because you cannot have too many. And the dove thing is arabic calligraphy for peace and love.


Don't worry those who replied, I have read them:

I hear you over the lack of fine detail - I have to keep visiting the screenshots to remind myself what I'm aiming for. However, my thought was to block in the bigger bits and let griff use his set of tools to do the fiddly stuff. Hopefully I can shave hours or even days off the production time.

Its tricky figuring what it is if you cannot see the normalmapped shot.

The neolite FDL was originally intended to be a fdl-ng, with a std spec with only one engine appearing in neolite core. But it was noticed that the higher spec version balances nicely and makes the ship worth having ... even with the strongly curtailed view. Nobody has complained that the specs are not standard so I kept it as is.

The griff-ferdelance is quite nice, especially the non-scuffed version. Perhaps griff can be pursuaded to keep it as a seperate oxp, a-la the original krait and boa. Boost its speed for a sports-craft?

This one - I've finally installed the trunk build via dpkg. Initial tests show I can run it with full shaders on my low-spec lappy (celeron-mobile, 1gig, i965 gfx, ubuntu 9.10) - which is actually better than 1.72 did.

Downloading griffs ships now, which should give me a nice set of examples.

The upshot is that I'll get the requested maps so some sort of think happens in this system then get them to griff for the final cutting.

I don't know if I should do those flames as decals or what?

Posted: Tue Nov 24, 2009 12:39 pm
by pagroove
Wow the mamba does look really sexy. I want one :)

Posted: Tue Nov 24, 2009 1:09 pm
by DaddyHoggy
pagroove wrote:
Wow the mamba does look really sexy. I want one :)
Which is fine as long as you're happy falling through somebody else's wormhole to get anywhere... :wink:

Posted: Wed Nov 25, 2009 5:11 am
by Simon B
... I never figured out how to disable the witch-drive on a player ship - suspect you can't. So a player-mamba would have a bit of extra.

Thought - perhaps I should start a parallel thread to this one so I don't end up dominating this celebration of all things griffin?

Posted: Wed Nov 25, 2009 6:40 am
by Commander McLane
Simon B wrote:
... I never figured out how to disable the witch-drive on a player ship - suspect you can't.
No, you can't. (EMMSTRAN!)

The only workaround I could think of is using a timer that constantly resets the player's fuel to 0. Alternatively you could set it to 0 on starting the countdown. Then the jump would fail. But still this wouldn't give the impression that no witchdrive is installed, because in that case you should get an error message by your ship's computer instead of a countdown.

..

Posted: Wed Nov 25, 2009 8:16 am
by Lestradae
Disabling the witchdrive:

An (admittedly non-elegant) workaround could be to set the hyperjump time to a few million seconds via <key>hyperspace_motor_spin_time</key>. That way, the ship you edited will effectively never be able to jump.

Posted: Wed Nov 25, 2009 8:45 am
by Killer Wolf
what about setting fuel to zero?

Posted: Wed Nov 25, 2009 8:50 am
by Commander McLane
Killer Wolf wrote:
what about setting fuel to zero?
That's what I suggested two posts above yours. :wink:

Posted: Wed Nov 25, 2009 11:30 am
by Killer Wolf
lol, so you did.

eh, i bet you just editted it in quickly after my suggestion! :-D

actually, i recall your drive could be destroyed or damaged as per any other equipment in Frontier/FE. i had a game end due to that, i was ferrying stuff to a low tech anarchy (IIRC) and got jumped on. turned out my hyperspace engine was knackered and the low tech place had no repair ability :-(

Posted: Thu Nov 26, 2009 12:38 am
by Simon B
OT Really - long jump timer actually looks good since it lets system ships use injectors. Isn't there a way to intercept a keystroke in a script?

I maintain that an ability to specify witchdrive=no in the shipdata would add to the game. Allowing wdrive to get damaged would too. The former opens the possibility to have in-system play as well as dedicated escort missions. The latter adds risk to combat.

Without a drive, you are restricted to in-system or following other craft through their wormholes. (I see that a wormhole scanner is an eq item now - cool.) A ship with a damaged wdrive would have to follow starships around until it entered a system which included a high tech repair facility - a navy station would do that, as well as the high-end behemoth.

The immediate effect would be to enable reasonable player versions of system ships - those fighters have speed 300 and no cargo, so combat only, but they'd be much cheaper than an asp. There are also shuttles and transports ... and a worm: your mission - infiltrate the navy shipyards and make off with the experimental craft...

Posted: Sun Nov 29, 2009 10:40 pm
by Griff
Added a Moray Starboat (link on 1st page - not yet included in Dizzy's all-in-1)
Image

Posted: Sun Nov 29, 2009 10:46 pm
by Kaks
Wow! I love the old sea boat texture! Seriously, I'll now spend some quality time just looking at your latest creation! :)

Posted: Sun Nov 29, 2009 10:51 pm
by Cody
Oh good... just in time for a late night flight.

Unzipped and installed. Thanks Griff.

Posted: Sun Nov 29, 2009 10:53 pm
by Griff
It's got a slightly neutered version of Ahrumans active camo shader going on it in, (nutered in that i could only spare 3 texture channels to create the effect instead of the 4 in the example shader), so you get a watery effect running over the top of the hull! linked the same effect into the glow map for the 'angry mode' - it gets a bit trippy, possibly a bit too much :D
i've been rushing to get this finished so i hope there are no bugs, i've got my eyes held open with matchsticks at the moment

Posted: Sun Nov 29, 2009 11:05 pm
by DaddyHoggy
Loving the aquamarine colour spilling out from the port holes - top notch Griff (as ever!) 8)