Griff's normalmapped ship remakes

[Smivs]

The Constrictor makes more than one appearance?

Not in the normal game, no. So enjoy it while you can.

Of course, depending on which OXPs you have you might come across the bootleg version from time to time.

[JD]

Thanks both for the prompt replies.

If it hadn't been for the snow, I'd be taking delivery of a shiny new PC today. Once that arrives you won't be able to see me for OXPs. This one will be amongst them.

Cheers
John

[Cody]

If it hadn't been for the snow, I'd be taking delivery of a shiny new PC today. Once that arrives you won't be able to see me for OXPs.

Oh lovely... enjoy!

[Griff]

Similar the the previous hermit test oxp, here's a test OXP for a new coriolis model for the shipset, it's bay differs slightly from the standard bay size, it's 237.016 'meters' wide and 84.1676 'meters' high (although some of its enterance is obstructed by some detailing on the mainhull object), before UV unwrapping & texturing it i thought it might be wise to check it's OK for gameplay, it does sort of seem to be, i watched a boaII from this shipset dock OK with it, but then an Anaconda following it made a very hesitant docking approach and ended up scraping itself all along the inside of the enterance before docking, not sure why that was, comparing the station & the anaconda models in wings3d, there's plenty of room for it to fit
http://www.box.net/shared/9uig4u4x8l

[Cody]

It seems to be alright in-game, Griff… I sat and watched one for quite a while, and no ships had any trouble docking, including me, although I didn’t see an Anaconda try it. I did see quite a few escorts crash into it after launching, though. Docked/launched a few times and had three of them floating around… then a furball went off, and chaos ensued. During the firefight, I got tagged as a fugitive and the Vipers started on me…

[Smivs]

Shit man, they got your stash. What a bummer

[Cody]

they got your stash.

Only a tenth of it… soon as I’d taken that pic, I was out of there on injectors, and hitting hyperspace... I had a run to make!

[Griff]

i remembered that i'd spun the model 90 degrees when working on it so that the dock area was horizontal which made it easier for me to work on, the original oolite station has the dock placed vertically so i just tried spinning my station 90 then re-exporting it into oolite, the anacoda seems to dock a lot more confidently now and doesn't scrape the walls (so much), plus Eric spotted some mistaked i'd made in the shipdata.plist so his fixes are in it now and i've ru-uploaded the oxp

[Killer Wolf]

well if it looks good on this cackky on-board vid card machine, it's gonna look awesome on my proper quad - and that's before it's even textured!!
just seen a Dominatrix launch from one no problem.
thoughts :
- If the compromised entrance bay is a prob for some ships, would slowing the rotation (slightly?) help? i'm wondering if the Conda doesn't have a good enough roll rate to make for 100% safe docking?
- 1800 polys!!! how does this sort of complexity affect people? is it worth a poll, because i'm still in the habit of trying to pare down my stuff to the absolute minimum : i could've made the Cobra IV a lot more finnicky but i'm still of the mind set that the slicker ships are the easier the game will handle dogfights etc. i asked for guidance way back about what poly sizes we generally acceptabel for performance but i don't think i got a difinitive reply. i have another design that i did for my Purgatori fanfic that i wanted to convert into a spaceship, http://www.purgatori.net/scorpius.jpg , but she'd be heavy on the polys i think

[Lestradae]

Wow, KW, that's a cool design!

Definitely would like to see that one in game!

[Griff]

That looks really great KW, has a really evil Visier's ship from Sinbad the Sailor vibe going on! Really lovely modelling work, if you're concerned about polygon counts, i think there might be few spots where you can save a few - if the sides of the hull are straight (which they seem to be from the front view) you could delete all those edge loops, plus there's a few bits on the top deck where what looks like a flat polygon is made up of a row of 6 polygons, you could select these then merge them into one (i think after selecting, right click on them then command is 'dissolve' or 'collapse' or something like that in wings)

Yeah, 1800 polys is a bit high, expecially as the planet is going to be drawn quite large at the same time - it's really going to stress chipset GPU's, i'm torn a bit really, i agree it is really important to support players with lower spec computers (Smivs & Deepspace's fab shipsets really can't be beaten at this), but then again this is a high rez shipset for players lucky enough to have a 3d accelerated graphics card, although i must admit, the last few items i've been doing have been starting to creep into the over egged pudding side of ship design, the recent hermit was about 2500 polygons!

[another_commander]

The test Coriolis, as it is now, does not seem to cause any kind of hiccup or slowdown on my laptop and I am on a mediocre Intel gfx chipset. This will probably change once shaders are applied, but so far so good.

[Griff]

yeah, it's probably when the textures are applied that the framerate will take a hit, i think i'm going to overlay the UV's from various sides all on top of each other in the map so various side of the station all share the same bit on the map, should help keep the texture size nice and small, although it might weird up the normal map a bit.
Still can't get Anacondas to dock nicely with the station without bumping their way in, halving the stations roll speed from 0.4 to 0.2 with the station_roll key helps, although they're still not all working perfectly, they seem to mess it up right at the end, they're heading in perfectly then with just a few meters to go, they get all panicky

[Killer Wolf]

Ah, cheers for the comments guys She's supposed to be about 300m long, the cockpit/bridge is up in the stinger bit of the stern. not sure if i could turn the outriggers' cannons into working plasma turrets or not? :-/

Yeah Griff, that's just a render from the original sculpt, for oolite there's loads of polys that could be merged etc, but of course there's a lot of remodelling to do anyway first - remove the oars and build in engine ports etc. (lol, btw - i was thinking of the Minaton rowing when i was writing the bits about the ship being sorcery powered!)
odd about the docking thing, sounds like it must be part of the engine code for the docking sequence, i taek it your Z-placement of the dock itself is ok etc? nothing that would make the dockingputer try a last minute correction?

[Eric Walch]

Still can't get Anacondas to dock nicely with the station without bumping their way in, halving the stations roll speed from 0.4 to 0.2 with the station_roll key helps, although they're still not all working perfectly, they seem to mess it up right at the end, they're heading in perfectly then with just a few meters to go, they get all panicky

Station_roll should not matter. anaconda roll is 0.75, so margin enough for correction.
There should be no difference between your and a normal station. Only slow ships could have more problems with aligning correct. FPS rate has influence on it, so when you see differences between stations I would guess its an effect of FPS itself, not the station model. Its more a flaw in the docking routine than. But seeing big ships doing more maneuvers to dock correctly is not wrong in itself.
On my computer I see the griff anacondas dock without a real problem although I did notice them doing one extra correction, compared with its escorts.