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The vulture would require very careful remodeling, since it already possesses sleekness to a large extent.
As for the size, given that the Revenant and the EC-109 both have minuscule cockpits compared to the overall ship size, this model could easily be the size of a hornet, for example (its plan view area would be approximately the same).
As for the size, given that the Revenant and the EC-109 both have minuscule cockpits compared to the overall ship size, this model could easily be the size of a hornet, for example (its plan view area would be approximately the same).
The Revenant, EC-89, and Raptor don't have cockpits.
VO doesn't really need remakes of the older ships. It just needs more ships.
That said, it does look really good. I'd probably lose the thrusters, though... they don't look quite right.
That said, it does look really good. I'd probably lose the thrusters, though... they don't look quite right.
You could actually model for the game if the devs let you. Heck, I can think of many advantages of letting the players make ship models and put them in game (per developer approval, that is.)
If any of the devs look at this, perhaps this could be a good idea?
If any of the devs look at this, perhaps this could be a good idea?
> The Revenant, EC-89, and Raptor don't have cockpits.
See how small they are!
Seriously, though, you're right of course.
See how small they are!
Seriously, though, you're right of course.
It's not so much that the devs won't let people model for the game, it's just hat modeling is a small fraction of the work involved in getting a ship into the game. There are limits that impact performance, different versions for different viewing resolutions, collision meshes, etc.. I believe that they still have a few unreleased ships from the previous artist (Luis) that are in various stages of completion.
I could model hats.
"Give me...jaunty. Good! Now rakish!"
OK, I'm gonna drop this quote just to save explanation later:
Tue, Apr 24, 2007 incarnate
"Um, taking a baseline model and making it ready for the game is not a 10-hour thing, by any stretch. Michael used the phrase "at least", because he's never done it and wasn't really sure :). He's also making references to Luis's ships where most of the work was already done to spec, but last I looked at them they all needed quite a bit of work. And I spent literally months training Luis. In fact, I probably spent about a man-month total, just on training him, so that's what.. about 160 hours?
To recap for new people: We're always grateful that people want to help add stuff, but ship models do not help us, they do not save us time. 98% of content development time is spent in texture coordinates, map design, shader tweaking and the like. Making a neat low-poly model takes maybe an hour for someone experienced, from scratch. The rest of the BS takes another 40 hours. You can cut corners, of course, re-using elements between textures and so on, but it's time consuming work regardless, and there are usually a lot of revisions. And that's just the graphical work, then you get into the game-content work.
Also, for anyone else who was unclear, this is not an unskilled job. I spent a great deal of time training Luis, and he had already worked as a full-time game developer on a 3D MMO and knew a great deal. If I spent the necessary time to train an intern, or whomever, on how to do everything.. well, I wouldn't have the time to do all my other work (like say, writing faction stuff), which I'm having enough trouble getting done as it is. It's a catch-22 of resource allocation.
So, to boil it down, we welcome people playing around with content creation and asking us about it. I would link to the Wiki thing I made, describing a lot of it, if the old design-wiki wasn't broken right now. But anyway, we welcome people wanting to be involved and doing stuff, but we do not want to raise anyone's expectations about our actually using their work. It's not an impossibility, but it hasn't happened to date.
Michael was basically trying to make this point, but unfortunately stating any public numbers (like "10 hours") is a bad idea. People tend to latch onto the number and try to apply it to everything, which is usually not accurate or even meaningful. For instance, I spent hours and hours just cleaning up Luis's meshes, because they invariably had floating vertices, strange lighting normals and unusual polygon boundaries that would propagate through into the shaders; not even getting into his odd normal maps, OBB (collision) hulls and so on. And I would go back and forth with him about this stuff, and he would get better, but even his latest work still has these problems. Content creation tends to be a case-by-case thing, and the only time you can really make a judgement of how long something will take.. is when someone experienced has been working with you, in your engine, on your game, using your tools, for quite a long time (a year or two). It is often less time consuming to create something *completely new*, yourself, than it is to fix something made by someone else and explain why their work was broken. This seems strange to non-game-developers, and not strange at all to people who have been there :).
This is why, although we think the idea is cool, we don't really have any great expectations of user-contributed content in the short term. It would require a great dedication of time both for the contributing individual as well as the developer (pretty much just me at this point) who would help them. And then, after spending all that time to learn how, they might well decide it wasn't for them and leave. In some sort of vague "long-run", I'd like to make tools and documentation publicly available and just let people go nuts, to see what they create. But beyond the little thing I wrote for the now-broken design wiki, I don't have the time to put into writing documentation, nor do we have the developer resources to put into making our very arcane/undocumented toolset (which all depend on very expensive programs) any easier for people to use.
So, yeah, that's sort of the realistic sense of it, as best I can say. Hope that helps. Don't want to discourage anyone from playing around, but don't want to create unreasonable expectations either :). "
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/1/16424#207671
OK, I'm gonna drop this quote just to save explanation later:
Tue, Apr 24, 2007 incarnate
"Um, taking a baseline model and making it ready for the game is not a 10-hour thing, by any stretch. Michael used the phrase "at least", because he's never done it and wasn't really sure :). He's also making references to Luis's ships where most of the work was already done to spec, but last I looked at them they all needed quite a bit of work. And I spent literally months training Luis. In fact, I probably spent about a man-month total, just on training him, so that's what.. about 160 hours?
To recap for new people: We're always grateful that people want to help add stuff, but ship models do not help us, they do not save us time. 98% of content development time is spent in texture coordinates, map design, shader tweaking and the like. Making a neat low-poly model takes maybe an hour for someone experienced, from scratch. The rest of the BS takes another 40 hours. You can cut corners, of course, re-using elements between textures and so on, but it's time consuming work regardless, and there are usually a lot of revisions. And that's just the graphical work, then you get into the game-content work.
Also, for anyone else who was unclear, this is not an unskilled job. I spent a great deal of time training Luis, and he had already worked as a full-time game developer on a 3D MMO and knew a great deal. If I spent the necessary time to train an intern, or whomever, on how to do everything.. well, I wouldn't have the time to do all my other work (like say, writing faction stuff), which I'm having enough trouble getting done as it is. It's a catch-22 of resource allocation.
So, to boil it down, we welcome people playing around with content creation and asking us about it. I would link to the Wiki thing I made, describing a lot of it, if the old design-wiki wasn't broken right now. But anyway, we welcome people wanting to be involved and doing stuff, but we do not want to raise anyone's expectations about our actually using their work. It's not an impossibility, but it hasn't happened to date.
Michael was basically trying to make this point, but unfortunately stating any public numbers (like "10 hours") is a bad idea. People tend to latch onto the number and try to apply it to everything, which is usually not accurate or even meaningful. For instance, I spent hours and hours just cleaning up Luis's meshes, because they invariably had floating vertices, strange lighting normals and unusual polygon boundaries that would propagate through into the shaders; not even getting into his odd normal maps, OBB (collision) hulls and so on. And I would go back and forth with him about this stuff, and he would get better, but even his latest work still has these problems. Content creation tends to be a case-by-case thing, and the only time you can really make a judgement of how long something will take.. is when someone experienced has been working with you, in your engine, on your game, using your tools, for quite a long time (a year or two). It is often less time consuming to create something *completely new*, yourself, than it is to fix something made by someone else and explain why their work was broken. This seems strange to non-game-developers, and not strange at all to people who have been there :).
This is why, although we think the idea is cool, we don't really have any great expectations of user-contributed content in the short term. It would require a great dedication of time both for the contributing individual as well as the developer (pretty much just me at this point) who would help them. And then, after spending all that time to learn how, they might well decide it wasn't for them and leave. In some sort of vague "long-run", I'd like to make tools and documentation publicly available and just let people go nuts, to see what they create. But beyond the little thing I wrote for the now-broken design wiki, I don't have the time to put into writing documentation, nor do we have the developer resources to put into making our very arcane/undocumented toolset (which all depend on very expensive programs) any easier for people to use.
So, yeah, that's sort of the realistic sense of it, as best I can say. Hope that helps. Don't want to discourage anyone from playing around, but don't want to create unreasonable expectations either :). "
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/1/16424#207671
Whistler, you are the king of finding useful quotes.
Just to reiterate my position:
Very very small chance of actually seeing this in the game. Many prerequisites need to be made, and most of them have low likelyhoods of happening.
I do this because it's -fun- to create ship meshes. And it's -fun- to create ship meshes based upon a polycount that a a certain game needs. And it's -fun- to re-create ships from a game that I enjoy.
The best I can reasonably ask for is that I can re-model all the ships, get a ton of ideas and opinions from the playerbase, and WHEN they get around to re-modeling their own ships, they'll look at these threads and take inspiration from my art molded by your opinions.
I also reasonably demand a cookie.
p.s., yeah, this mesh needs a hat badly. could you help me out?
Just to reiterate my position:
Very very small chance of actually seeing this in the game. Many prerequisites need to be made, and most of them have low likelyhoods of happening.
I do this because it's -fun- to create ship meshes. And it's -fun- to create ship meshes based upon a polycount that a a certain game needs. And it's -fun- to re-create ships from a game that I enjoy.
The best I can reasonably ask for is that I can re-model all the ships, get a ton of ideas and opinions from the playerbase, and WHEN they get around to re-modeling their own ships, they'll look at these threads and take inspiration from my art molded by your opinions.
I also reasonably demand a cookie.
p.s., yeah, this mesh needs a hat badly. could you help me out?
This ship model has created more discussion than any other single one I've seen. You're doing a good job.
I think that he's one of the few ones to go at it with any kind of serious attitude.
And one of the few who can take criticisms, without spitting his dummy out :)
I took Sunday off to watch porn, praise god, drink, and smoke cigarettes.
In other words, I took a day off.
But that didn't stop me from fooling around with an idea for the Warthog. How do you guys feel about a large gun thinly disguised as a vehicle?
Back on to the centurion/hornet/really damn sexy Atlas/whatever it is best suited to represent today/, should I change the cockpit? As in new geometry?
If so, should I be looking at any specific ship in our current lineup?
In other words, I took a day off.
But that didn't stop me from fooling around with an idea for the Warthog. How do you guys feel about a large gun thinly disguised as a vehicle?
Back on to the centurion/hornet/really damn sexy Atlas/whatever it is best suited to represent today/, should I change the cockpit? As in new geometry?
If so, should I be looking at any specific ship in our current lineup?
Due to a demand to see the basic concept of the warthog I spoke of...
http://i304.photobucket.com/albums/nn163/Fediroc/hog.jpg
Took about ten minutes, so if you're going to say it looks incomplete...
orly?
http://i304.photobucket.com/albums/nn163/Fediroc/hog.jpg
Took about ten minutes, so if you're going to say it looks incomplete...
orly?
Forget incomplete; how about lame? It would make a great bus variant. But for the Warthog fast attack fighter? Ha.
It looks incomplete. yarly.
It looks... sluggish and ugly. But I guess it'll live up to its name, then.
It looks... sluggish and ugly. But I guess it'll live up to its name, then.
looks more like an atlas to me
Yeah, the concept I'm going for is another early-generation ship. This time, one of the first heavy fighters. The outline of the story I came up with on the fly is:
Originally designed as a mining vessel, the Warthog was an unsuccessful attempt to use smaller ships for mining operations. Built like a tank to survive rough usage in the mining industry, and with a huge payload capacity in the nose of the ship, it was only a matter of time before it was adapted for combat use. Simplified history:
Pirates: Yarr mateys, lets slap a bigass gun thar!
Mercenaries: We've been sent to rid space of your stench!
Pirates: We've died!
Mercenaries: This is a nice base. Hey, look, one of those newfangled heavy fighters over there.
Other mercenaries: Let's copy it and use it!
Everyone else: Let's update it!
Everyone else a few hundred years later: Hey, there's better ships now!
Modern pirates: Not as cheap as this is. Yarr!
No, seriously, I had to dig deep(about two minutes) to figure out how to change the look of the Warthog to something non-BSG, while retaining the frontal profile.
The problem with THAT is that the current profile doesn't support the intended usage. A small port AND a large port? From where? That meant I had to beef it up. And beefing was in order, given the amount of armor these bastards carry. Expect reduced or negated wings, and -slightly- increased fuselage profile, basically the same profile.
And if you think it looks slow... the stats are slow. Basic model to basic model(basic models dictate how the improved ones look), it's the slowest single-man attack ship in the game. Slower than the rag, slower than the hornet. Much smaller than either. About the same size as a Cent. The only ships to match it's meager top-out at 180m/s are the Atlas and Revenant, neither of which I think we can consider to be designed to mix it up.
Originally designed as a mining vessel, the Warthog was an unsuccessful attempt to use smaller ships for mining operations. Built like a tank to survive rough usage in the mining industry, and with a huge payload capacity in the nose of the ship, it was only a matter of time before it was adapted for combat use. Simplified history:
Pirates: Yarr mateys, lets slap a bigass gun thar!
Mercenaries: We've been sent to rid space of your stench!
Pirates: We've died!
Mercenaries: This is a nice base. Hey, look, one of those newfangled heavy fighters over there.
Other mercenaries: Let's copy it and use it!
Everyone else: Let's update it!
Everyone else a few hundred years later: Hey, there's better ships now!
Modern pirates: Not as cheap as this is. Yarr!
No, seriously, I had to dig deep(about two minutes) to figure out how to change the look of the Warthog to something non-BSG, while retaining the frontal profile.
The problem with THAT is that the current profile doesn't support the intended usage. A small port AND a large port? From where? That meant I had to beef it up. And beefing was in order, given the amount of armor these bastards carry. Expect reduced or negated wings, and -slightly- increased fuselage profile, basically the same profile.
And if you think it looks slow... the stats are slow. Basic model to basic model(basic models dictate how the improved ones look), it's the slowest single-man attack ship in the game. Slower than the rag, slower than the hornet. Much smaller than either. About the same size as a Cent. The only ships to match it's meager top-out at 180m/s are the Atlas and Revenant, neither of which I think we can consider to be designed to mix it up.
how to change the look of the Warthog to something non-BSG
We don't need to. First, that design looks great. Second, it's not a design that originated with BSG. Third, the basic shape itself isn't protected by copyright.
Also, the 'Hog Mk II is anything but slow at 220 m/s with a 50 drain.
And now that I think about it, that fugly thing looks an awful lot like the new Wraith.
We don't need to. First, that design looks great. Second, it's not a design that originated with BSG. Third, the basic shape itself isn't protected by copyright.
Also, the 'Hog Mk II is anything but slow at 220 m/s with a 50 drain.
And now that I think about it, that fugly thing looks an awful lot like the new Wraith.
If the Warthog were intended to mimic the BSG Vipers it would have two small ports (left and right), not one small port and one large port (front and back)...