The Seraphim - A custom Ship OXP from start to finish.

Scarecrow · Post by **Scarecrow** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 7:58 pm

Flipped normals it is then

Scarecrow · Post by **Scarecrow** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 11:11 pm

Right. This is more what I had in mind, I think...

You can see the original Viper outlined for scale.

Crow

JensAyton · Post by **JensAyton** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 11:32 pm

Giant battle mechs flying it? (The Viper is 55 metres long.)

wackyman465 · Post by **wackyman465** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 11:52 pm

What is? I WANT!

Lestradae · Post by **Lestradae** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 12:11 am

I have never said that before and am perplexed that I say it, just mentioning that raising the poly count that high will lead to a sort of performance hit that it will no longer be possible to have a lot of ships in with models with such counts

Seriously people, if I start saying this, it's the case

wackyman465 · Post by **wackyman465** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 12:13 am

But it's pretty.. who cares about framerate when you can have stuff like Griff Boas flying around Trade Outposts?

Lestradae · Post by **Lestradae** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 12:16 am

wackyman465 wrote:
.. who cares about framerate when you can have stuff like Griff Boas flying around Trade Outposts?

Normally, that's my line to say here

But, if the needed specs for all that start going beyond the 2GB RAM/2.5GHz dual core needed limit, I start getting nervous, too.

Seriously, I start having this issue with my OSE WiP now ... thinking about demanding 4GB RAM. Question is, if this doesn't leave nearly everyone behind who wants to have it specs-wise, and anyone doing something with a 600+ poly count will have to face that question, too.

Perhaps I should just think "Moore's Law" again and relax, though.

wackyman465 · Post by **wackyman465** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 1:00 am

I don't have 4 gb ram, and I'm running Oolite on a top spec iMac from a year ago!

ClymAngus · Post by **ClymAngus** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 6:52 am

Ahruman wrote:
Giant battle mechs flying it? (The Viper is 55 metres long.)

To be a touch more charitable (but a lot less funny), you could scale it down and make it a funky escape pod, or nix out the people, replace with darkened glass and you can get around the scale issue as is...

JensAyton · Post by **JensAyton** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 7:50 am

wackyman465 wrote:
I don't have 4 gb ram, and I'm running Oolite on a top spec iMac from a year ago!

I do have 4 GiB of RAM, and I’m also running Oolite on a top spec iMac from a year ago. Well, a bit more now. It only cost about 1/15th of what the computer did. :-)

Commander McLane · Post by **Commander McLane** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 9:02 am

Price-wise it wouldn't be an issue, but my MacBook Pro doesn't house more than 2GB, and I'm not going to replace it anytime soon.

Scarecrow · Post by **Scarecrow** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 9:50 am

Right, where do I start?

Firstly, according to the Wiki (at least, I'm sure I read it in the Wiki, I can't check because it's currently down), the ship measurements are in Feet not metres. So the Viper is 55 Feet not 55 Metres, making those pilots 6 feet tall - well, okay they may be 7-8 feet tall but it's close enough.
Or I could be nit-picky and say it's more accurately 55 units long, so even if the ships are measured in metres, they can still be feet in my version and not make any difference.

Regarding the poly-count. As someone who has been working professionally as a video game artist for over ten years, I really don't feel that 2000 polys is very much on modern machines - and by modern, I don't mean £2000, cutting edge, next-gen gaming machines, I mean an average video card on an average PC produced in the last couple of years.

To be fair, most modern systems will complement a high poly count with a LOD system which Oolite doesn't appear to have - so if dozens of ships are being drawn in full even though they are only a pixel in size on screen then, yes, that is a waste of memory and processing power.

As an aside, if you really want to improve your frame rate, try shrinking some of the texture files. Oolite has models with only a dozen triangles and then one or more 512x512 PNGs slapped on top which are little more than a Photoshop noise filter - and many of which have nearly 50% wasted space!!!.
Try shrinking them down to 128x128, you'll notice very little difference in visual quality and it'll free up masses of vram.

Crow

Commander McLane · Post by **Commander McLane** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 10:09 am

Everything in Oolite is supposed to be meters. (That appears to have been different in 8-bit Elite, where measurements were in feet, which explains some of the transitional confusion between Elite and Oolite.)

Scarecrow · Post by **Scarecrow** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 10:51 am

Strewth!
Then I guess, I'll just have to call it feet. Small ships are more interesting anyway

Possible names for this class so far are, Angel, Archangel, Avenging-Angel or, more suitably, Guardian-Angel.

Hmmmmm....

Crow

Griff · Post by **Griff** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 11:10 am

that looks fantastic, both the old design & the new one!
Is that the flipped normal glass trick you mentioned earlier that we can see on the cockpit on the new design ship? that's a really clever workaround!