I don’t understand most of what you said, but I’m pretty sure I based my physics off of an old post you wrote somewhere on some part of the internet that probably doesn’t exist anymore. It was a description of Freelancer’s physics and included simple formulas for calculating stuff that I implemented into my “Freelancer simulator.”

In terms of linear stuff, it seems to have worked perfectly and mimicked the quirks that happen when you set weird values in Freelancer. For example, plugging in vanilla values gave speeds and accelerations that seemed to line up 1:1 to Freelancer. Ditto for when I plugged in crazy values like what’s used in 88 Flak for its very weird take on Freelancer’s physics.

What tripped me up was how rotational forces work. I essentially made something up that if I recall correctly was the same ideas as translational, just applied to rotations. When in cockpit view, where you have more direct control of the ship, it seemed to line up very closely, but it was very slightly off in a way I don’t recall. Again, using both vanilla and Flak values, I got something that felt close enough that you’d need a stopwatch to really tell the difference.

Where it got weird though was in third person. I suspect that you aren’t actually flying your ship in third person, and instead the AI is flying it. I did tests in Freelancer and noticed that your turn rate is actually faster in third person when compared to the cockpit. My turn rates matched the cockpit turn rates, but not the third person ones. I suspect that when the ship banks in third person, the ship is now using a part of its pitch torque to turn. The combined power of the yaw torque and a slight pitch torque means it turns a bit faster.

That becomes a question of control though at that point, and not physics, but I thought it was very interesting.

Edit:

Yes, there are also a lot of particulars and quirks if you want to emulate Freelancer 1:1, especially when it comes to engine kill and cruise.

For engine kill, you switch to using only the ship’s inherent linear drag. The engine turns off, and when it turns off it also stops providing drag. However, if you use the thruster or strafe, the engine must turn back on so that you maintain your limited top speed. If you don’t turn it back on, then using the thruster you’ll be able to accelerate to whatever top speed is implied by your linear drag. Using vanilla values, it ends up being effectively unlimited because it’s only 1.

Cruise gets weird as well. Cruise has a set speed to reach, but it still uses forces to achieve those speeds. At least, I think it does. That’s how I wrote it anyway. I have to do some pre-emptive calculations, but I figure out how much thrust is required to reach cruise speed (300 in vanilla’s case) when the engine is on (so engine + ship drag). Then, when the cruise engines turn on, I ramped up this additional cruise engine force to slowly get to that pre-calculated value. If you just apply the cruise engine force instantaneously, then you don’t get the smooth ramp up to speed like you do in vanilla FL. You know how when you drop out of cruise you decelerate to your normal speed almost instantaneously? The same exact thing happens in reverse when you just apply the extra cruise engine thrust on its own.

Your work on this is unbelievable. You deserve much more fanfare. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen THN files decoded and re-rendered like that before.

I’m surprised that I never posted this here on Starport. In March I made a Freelancer “flight simulator” with the goal of getting a flight model as close as possible to Freelancer, even using my own set of modified physics that run on the same formula as Freelancer.

You can actually plug in values from a Freelancer ship and it’ll fly almost exactly the same as it would in the real game. The differences come in how mouse flight is handled, but you can eliminate those differences by flying in cockpit view. Either way, it’s still extremely close, to the point where the only way you’d notice the differences is putting video of the two side by side.

The video player seems to be broken, so here’s a link to the video.

Holy crap, man. That’s incredible. I remember when the ALE format was just getting figured out and here you are making a new renderer for them.

The fog and asteroid field look great as well. Do you have plans for working on the rendering of asteroid fields from the outside? FL had some wickedly clever tricks for making that look as good as it did with the simple set of tools it had available.

I love seeing people do these little re-interpretations of Freelancer. Looks great. How does it fly?

Timmy51m wrote:
They look really old now don’t they, like lego bricks in space. I haven’t played in a couple of years because I don’t want to spoil the memory of the game. Maybe if I could play it on a mobile phone or something with similarly small sized screen I wouldn’t notice how basic everything looks, but I’m on a 32" screen these days and they look like something out of minecraft

You just mucking about or is this going somewhere? I’ve long hoped that somehow there would be an overhaul of the visuals.

Just messing around. I don’t think there’s really much you can do to the models/texture to improve them considering how they were made. You’d probably have to remodel/retexture them from scratch to really create something that’s a big improvement. Even then, the designs themselves were created around the poly/material limitations they had, so it’d take some real creative talent to spruce them up while still keeping the same overall designs.

I’m just messing around. I’m not working on remaking the game or anything because that would be silly.

I’ve always wanted to have a catalog of all the Freelancer models. The handful of the ones I had from before are in awkward formats and don’t look as good as ingame due to material issues. With the new method, I can get them exported fairly painlessly and with their material colors intact.

HunterKiller wrote:
They look good. Freelancer was an inspiration to many.

It’s only like the bestest game ever.

Wow, I’m mad impressed by the way you’re able to display that much using just native Freelancer files. This is great stuff.

By the way, it crashes on me if I have my joysticks plugged in. I don’t know if it’s because of those two specific sticks (Saitek X-55) or if it’s because with them plugged in I have 4 controllers available, but I figured I’d let you know. Here’s the crash I get:

http://i.imgur.com/4ia8bhd.png

HeIIoween wrote:
Huh. I thought it is just 3D viewer by Unity.

You can do damn near anything in Unity given enough motivation.

Another snippet of messing around.

I get a real kick out writing light related things in Unity so I decided to write some simple position light code that can get re-used for a basically anything with a light flare.

The whole thing works based on a custom quad based GameObject. The quad rotates to face the camera like any other sprite, but there’s an offset that you can now enter which allows it to pass in front of geometry as needed. This prevents the ugly scenario where a quad is clipping through some really key geometry.

The quad also shrinks in size based on a specified max angle so that for directional light situations, the light is difficult to see unless you’re looking down it. This is especially useful for spotlights.

These lights can be set to blink with three parameters: Duration, ramp time, and delay. Duration is how long a light holds its max size at the blink, ramp time is how long it takes to get to that max value, and delay is how long between each successive blink. Using this allows you to create flashing strobe lights (not in the video) or slow fading pulsing lights (in the video).

Lights can be set to automatically generate a physical light so that they can cast light. The light is automatically handled and reflects any blinking that the light might be doing.

Finally, the lights scale with distance (up to a point) so that you can see them far away. The headlight in particular, due to its size, is extremely visible from far away.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DrlSlPbkjo

A few days ago I figured out a pretty good and efficient pipeline for exporting Freelancer models. What started with just a handful of my favorite ships blew up into my exporting every ship, weapon, and turret over the last few days. I kinda got carried away.

The especially interesting thing to note is that Freelancer’s material colors were preserved. The game makes heavy use of re-using textures, and it added variety and color to the ships by simply re-coloring them. The Bretonian ships in particular make heavy use of this. Here’s a Bretonian Battleship with and without any of its material colors. The last time I exported some Freelancer models, and the reason I was curious to try this again, is because all those material colors were lost and things looked decidedly more boring than they should have.

I’m sure many of the experienced modders already know this, but something else pretty cool is the huge number of unused weapon and missile models. There’s a ton of them. I really wonder why so many of them went unused.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZiGPbuD8fU

Hey Sol, just wanted to drop a note saying that your work is pretty damn good. I’ve been keeping an eye on it ever since you started several years ago. I think I’m starting to see Star Citizen references in your latest work.

I’m thinking of using some of your models for a little project I’m working on in Unity, so I thought I would let you know. Keep up the great work!

I already replied to wasabitoy’s e-mail, but to answer your question on here, that effect in the video was never released.

If you were able to follow the tutorial and get the other things working then you did everything right. That effect was specifically designed for a specific configuration of the ENB Series bloom shader. When it was played without that bloom shader, the effect looks like a messy, nasty, yellow blob. I always wanted to go back to that and re-do it so it worked in vanilla Freelancer but I just never got around to it.

I’m with Chips and FF here.

I don’t care what you think about the project. This is the best shot the space sim genre has gotten in the past ten years for a revival.

I’ve often wondered to myself what it would take to bring back the space sim genre. Not necessarily in the spotlight mind you, but visible enough that it’s a real genre that people make games for. A genre that people talk about and can find the funding to make large AAA games with. A genre about as accepted and diverse as the racing game.

My conclusion was always that it would take one of two things. Either somebody highly visible comes out of nowhere with a lot of money and strong marketing, or a respectable and established studio that can afford to take a big loss decides to do something radical and risk making a AAA space sim.

In a bizarre twist of fates, the first scenario is happening right now in front of us. This is a project with a big name behind it, with a big and flashy enough demo to wow the average consumer, and potentially with the money to even attempt something on the scale of a AAA space sim. This is our chance. I don’t care what you think about Chris Roberts, his reputation, or Star Citizen itself. If this game fails, we won’t get another shot at this for who knows how long.

THAT is why I’m backing this. THAT is why I support this game. Am I worried that Roberts could be pulling a Peter Molyneux? Absolutely, but this is a chance I’m willing to take. If nobody takes that chance, then we are guaranteed to get nothing, and you can rest easy in your knowledge that your cynicism was rewarded.

Based on the interviews that he gave shortly before this came up, it would sound like he wants to do a more Wing Commander style game. If that’s true then it will have more in common with Freespace than it would Freelancer.

However all the news bits and universe building stuff don’t really sound like a mission-based game. They sound like something you would see or care about in a game with a more open world.

I don’t know. Like I said before the game could be anything at this point. Hell, I’m not even convinced there is a game yet. Primarily because I have no idea where the funding for this is coming from or going to be coming from. For all I know this is just Roberts testing the waters to see how much interest there might be in a potential space sim.

I can’t get excited about possible space sims anymore after having been so consistently let down in the past.

This news has broken that trend. I get more and more excited the more I look around the site. We still don’t know what it is. It could be anything at this point, but I don’t really care. This is the most exciting space sim related news I’ve heard in a very long time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9Xhjmg3Wf8

And that’s it. Sorry for the double post. This is probably the last video of this project there will ever be. It was a really fun learning experience and I hope to be able to apply it to something someday.

If nothing else it’s gotten me to really think about how a game like this would work. All the physics, some AI, and control issues that all arose were really interesting problems to try and tackle.

Edit: Post ate my video, should be back now.

Since the last update, turrets now have actually shoot and align with where the mouse is pointing. I also put in a lot of extra cool stuff like having the barrels fire separately. They have visible recoil. It’s a neat effect that you’ll see in the video when I post it. Another cool thing about the weapon firing is that as you zoom out, the effect gets slightly larger. Homeworld 2 did this and it really made distant battles pop. There were also some minor tweaks to how the lens flares work.

In addition I also imported the Dreadnought and added some more waypoints for the AI. The Dreadnought is scaled up from it’s vanilla size based on the size of the windows. It’s actually a pretty good size. It’s much bigger than the Rhino, and the Rhino was already much bigger than the Defenders.

I think is about as far as I’m willing to go with this. I’m not comfortable expanding on this prototype with the current systems in place. If I were to go further than this, I would want to re-write almost everything from scratch to make it far more robust and workable in the context of a game.

Freestalker.fr wrote:
Have you tried to maneuver thrusters, like in Nexus TJI. It could be cool to see that.

This is awesome, amazing to see how it works fine!

As it is right now all those effects are not easy to change. If I were to take this beyond just a fun little prototype/demo then I would re-write the engine effect code from scratch, and definitely add the little maneuvering thrusters. It shouldn’t be that difficult to do given the proper planning. I’ve already a couple ideas how to do it in a simple and dynamic way.

As for the $1500 for Unity Pro, as FF already said, you’re only paying for extra stuff. Right now the only extra stuff that I’m using is post processing effects like bloom and blur. Without them the game would look a little more like Freelancer. You also lose some really cool features like Render to Target, but it’s all stuff you could build a fully functional game without. The biggest hit for free people is the loss of dynamic shadows.

Quick screenshot without any of the post processing effects. It’s a lot more noticeable in motion, but it’s not like it looks terrible without it.

Tonight I started writing turret scripts. Unlike pretty much everything else I’ve written for this little prototype, I’m actually trying to do the turrets right. Meaning, writing the script so that it is robust enough to handle all sorts of arbitrary turrets.(Provided the models were setup correctly.)

As of tonight I have them tracking arbitrary targets. They also can be given limits in elevation and azimuth. A good example of azimuth limiting is the front turret on the Rhino. It can’t turn past a certain point or else it would end up hitting the ship. Elevation limits prevent the barrels from elevating to impossible extremes.

Next up is to write an actual turret controller. This means something that will actually assign targets to turrets. Right now I’m only doing it in a sort of developer/debug way. There’s no way right now for a player to assign targets.

No video for tonight. Turrets aren’t _that_ exciting.

sumanuti wrote:
fantastic work. it really looks promising.
as I remember, some Russian guy also started to make one similar, just dunno was it with a same engine.
rly wanted to see work being finished and test the feel of flying / shooting!
fingers crossed 4 u to succeed, even with freeware version (if it is as “must”)

Yeah I remember it. It is the same engine. I haven’t actually looked at their code beyond just a glance. I wanted to start from scratch anyway. Another thing to keep in mind is that if I was to ever make this into an actual game, I would have to rewrite nearly all of this from scratch. I didn’t really build any of this in any supportable way. I just wanted a proof of concept demo that looked really impressive beyond all else.

Timmy51m wrote:
I take it you’ve tried Black Prophecy Why? That’s Unity, and although not a popular game, it’s visually impressive and the AI is just fine.

I tried it a long time ago. I had no idea it was Unity. It was a very visually impressive game, but I never actually got into it because of how bad the lag was. The game also felt kind of clunky. It’s too bad really, because it looked fantastic.

J.Walker wrote:
Hey Why, nice looking so far.

Have you thought of trying Torque 3d? A little bit more involved than Unity, but if you want buy it it is only $150 USD , you get access to full engine source code, and 2 programming seats on the license. It also comes with browser plugins that you can compile specific to your project for FireFox and Internet Explorer to allow playing via the browser. It is a modern Triple A rated game engine with one of the best Networking code bases available.

EA, Bioware, Microsoft, and NASA all use a version of the Torque engine. With the Cost of Full Source at only $150 USD it is way more affordable the a License to Unity at $1500 USD.

Just a suggestion. check it out at: http://www.garagegames.com if you want to have a look.

It is what i am using currently.

Unity license does suck for being so expensive. I haven’t looked at Torque but I think it’s pretty funny to use the Tribes 2 engine for a space sim.

I did at one point use the Ogre 3D graphics library to try something similar. I got much further along in that project than I did this one. I had integrated an open source physics engine and my own ship managers and spawners. It was far more robust than this hard coded, but pretty, demo. I’m not to keen on switching engines. Not at least until my pro trial runs out anyway.

What are you using Torque for anyway?