Raise your voices!
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For such ambitious plans it would be nearly a waste to concentrate too much on current FL. It would require a lot of hooking and such.
Librelancer or something else might be much better suited since you have access to everything. And I mean not just interfaces.
But that would still need to be finalized. So until then, I know, there is only Freelancer.Btw the link to the interface prototype you had in your post earlier was very nice.
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Skotty., hehe, i’ll show it later with all of the docs, there’s still a lot of work
I’ve told about Librelancer at the main post and would be glad to see its author comment here. I cannot say anything about engines and just will do all what i can. Of course i will attempt to discuss our possibilities with everyone who is up to, as i experience a lack of information and these questions are quite uncomfortable, i think we need some time there to let people see this topic and think about a collaboration
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Regarding the video: I already have MyGui included in the wrapper. But it is another thing to hook all the interface controls of Freelancer. If adoxa or someone else could do that it might work. Also someone would have to create all the designs for MyGui. I plan to use it for the graphic options etc.
I use Skype very rarely. Usually I have Miranda running. If there is a plugin for your messenger protocol I can use it. There is a Skype plugin, but you also have to have Skype running besides Miranda, which is a really bad solution. I only have it installed on an old laptop.
I think you might convince more people when the project is in a more working state, meaning quite a few high poly models with good textures and a working version of my wrapper. But we will see
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When you talk about expanding the univers, I have some ideas of IMG and Gaian ship.
IMG ships can be some sort of Starflier with a vampir look that have yellow tint.
Gaian ships can be organic prototype that look like this to replace the starflier or startracker and something that look like a fusion between wasp, bat or something else that fly for the Hawk.
I’ve made some side viewed concept.
P.S. I hope that I haven’t done an “Out Subject”.
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Freestalker.fr, hi! Nothing can be off-topic in our situation i think, anyone alive is welcome here.
Any concept is good and if you like these factions - feel free to go on. Until i publish a docs i do not know how public will accept them, and if you will find them cool we obviously can merge or replace stuff.Actually my main question about Gaians is: will they exist after few decades? As well as xenos, farmers (alliance and lbw) and GCs? They all have a single base and can be easily defeated by an assault of Navys if they start to make real troubles, or maybe this is wise for them to unite with prime criminals of these sectors? I do not want to remove them neither leave them, but i try to follow logical steps of timeline after vanilla stuff happened, and this question is arguable. What do you think?
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If you want to go on in the timeline, you really should take your time and read all rumours in Freelancer. They provide a lot of material! Like Kishiro working on a ship with jump-drive, as the Osiris already has. ALG fusioning with Krüger Minerals, etc.
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I’ve an idea! If we expand the campaign, it would be cool that Trent would become a starship commander, begin with gunboat class then cruiser/destroyer and finally battleship/dreadnought but he wouldn’t be an admiral and will only execute Orilion orders (woops! I didn’t know I will do this joke before writing this, that was unwanted ^_^’ ).
I have some weapons idea :
We could expand particle weapons, adding proton based weapon like an hydrogen cation canon, electron based weapon that can be called cathodic canon. For the FX the proton canon can use the regular red particle (positiv charge) fx and for electron we can just modify bretonian particle fx and make it bluer (negative charge). As for neutron we can make them exclusively green (neutral charge).I have ideas about shield :
It will not be any longer energetic but armor types and devices. For electric based weapon we can use lightning rod. For thermal based weaps we can use heat shield. For radioactive weaps, wee can use this .That’s just some thoughts.
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Another idea! Making gluon shield that would be good against particle and neutron weapons.
We can extend capship weapons to all Freelancer weapon types and create new classes with available 3D models, for instance Bretonian Battleship could have more classes, one with more particle weapons and another with more tachyon weapons. It could improve ship variety in the gameplay and force the player to scan the ship he is going to fight.
Here is a cool lightning rod :
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Freestalker.fr, variablility in playstyle and team tactics is the primary objective of weapon and shield (not only, of course) stuff, you’re right.
If i start to explain these moments right now, i will have to say everything what i write on a concepts, because every part is relative to another one. But be sure they are very close to the things you said. Maybe naming will differ a lot, but it can be replaced of course. Im thinking about to make a google-doc table for everyone who knows better be able to replace a stuff with their own, especially nationality-colored factions/houses. About battleship weapons, and weapons at all, every ship class shall recieve a unique new weapon types (besides common ones of course) - but some of them require a little coding. Scanning will be absoultely must-have, cuz vanilla table of damage blocking is expanded a lot, also, as you say, factions recieve 2 or 3 of 5 primary weapon types, and you cannot know which one will be used against you, same as shields. I’ve made an extremely cool shield system, where capacity does not equal efficiency at all and it is builded around 2 values - sqrt(cap*reg) and cap/reg, where first one is the real power, and the second one defines shield type and weapon type absorb. -
Some update about models.
space_dome http://i.imgur.com/BIJmjAK.jpg
space_factory01 http://i.imgur.com/hMjsd9i.png
space_freeport http://i.imgur.com/09Yf1iF.jpg
space_industrial http://i.imgur.com/YVwfD3u.png
space_industrial01 http://i.imgur.com/fORtjct.jpg
space_industrial02 http://i.imgur.com/AyAgcWd.jpg
space_police http://i.imgur.com/83rdadd.png
space_tankl http://i.imgur.com/Q3nI3MV.png
Here is a table of current state:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uh5qI_fBV9o0Ji_eBGFQ7ubuWBb3ScXZaVuPS9sG7Mc/edit?usp=sharingI am stuck at unwrapping and texturing, cuz have no experience in it. If you are a professional of this sphere and can help - let me know.
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Oh, those are really nice models.
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Nice models, although these sort of details typically go into normal maps (plus bump and ambient occlusion maps) rather than actual poly geometry. Problem with existing vanilla FL model assets is that they were made to reuse same set of textures without much consideration about edges and seams, so simply adding normal mapping over existing geometry would wouldn’t always have a correct result, especially where a model relies a lot on UV mirroring to tile textures and cover seams (and a lot in FL stations and misc assets do that). I guess there’s a sense in “remodeling”… However I don’t think these models, even when finished, would do well as drop-in replacements for vanilla mehses, there are mesh format limitations (16-bit vertex indices, though you can break model into multiple vmeshes internally but it comes with own set of issues too), old render being inefficient at handling this geometric complexity, the game does struggle with higher fidelity model assets.
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Treewyrm, they actually do not reach poly limit and are about 10-15k.
Also i think that restructuring will allow to organise parts better and do not use same ones several times, and bring logics and possible proper use in dynamic ecenomics system later. Only issue i see is docking, but it is fixable one in possible future. About normal maps - they are cool on a long and mid range, but being close geometry is better a lot and allows to make sub-stuff by using normals on them.
Skotty., ty! -
Due to per-property vertex buffer format those 10+k models will run into 16-bit vertex index limit right away. Besides the game simply doesn’t handle complexity of such things, the engine has no smart buffer caching like static meshes copying does in unreal engine and many others. I’m saying this not to dissuade you but I ran into numerous rendering issues in FL when going with much fancier models.
There’s a good reason why normal maps is such a prevalent technique in real-time rendering and continues to do so as well. Back in the day graphics card manufacturers would boast about how many triangles they can render per second, but that sort of “mhz wars”-like comparison had been gone for a long time, instead the focus had been on smarter techniques and managing performance for complex shader code.
Sure models could be broken down to multiple LODs but I don’t recall if there were any games and their engines that would break mesh further into pre-baked state at close-up distances.
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I did mention about splitting into multiple vmesh libraries to overcome vertex index size, so I wasn’t saying it’s impossible. I can dig up some of my own models and technically they all work, quirks with mixing material transparency types show up more prominently and so on. A lone ship sure ain’t gonna harm anything but drop in bases which are made of several parts and then consider that you may see several bases on the screen within view distance, a dozen or so ships of similar fidelity and I’m sure you get the idea where it’s going.
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We’re spawning dozens of ships for NPC events, we’ve tested with large fleets of ships with polycounts in the 50k+, and it’s running fine with all the rendering stuff Freeworlds adds (which is way heavier than even Schmack’s thing).
I think you’re severely overestimating the cost of pushing some polygons and draw calls.
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Quite obviously I can’t comment on what modifications are in Freeworlds, how they handle performance and on what systems. Pretty sure what I meant is running stuff on vanilla and testing lots of high-poly objects in view range. Especially on not-so-modern lower-to-mid-tier graphics cards as well as integrated gpus where things ain’t so peachy really and raw poly quantity makes them struggle.
Anyway all I wanted to say is that .Nx’s models are nice, but as mentioned before, most of these details, in my opinion, are better implemented as normal maps, indented parts perhaps as parallax mapping too. He has high-res models already so baking details into maps shouldn’t be difficult. What remains of course is the engine to put all that good stuff into.
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Treewyrm, i can also confirm that vanilla does well with mass of polys. Another my old vid where you can see ~20k tradelanes and ~50k bases with no draw distance limit https://youtu.be/v7rKWzhJrF0?t=1m18s
FPS is low because of ENB with extremely old radeon 9800 card, being turned off it was common.
Anyway i model trying to optimize and keep topology perfect.
