Another model I'm working on

Well, yes and no. The cockpit and Cal seen on the player ships is not an effect. It's an actual teeny tiny little model put inside the player ship model. So yes, I could do that.


Cool picture, huh?

But, as I pointed out in another post the Cal and cockpit models are wildly out of scale, making Cal a giant. My Star Wars ships are to actual scale, so a cockpit and pilot for one would be at most 1/4 the size of the game ones. Now you have to realize what kind of ship sizes we're talking about here. The Tie Interceptor a little over 9 meters in length, making the ball structure where the pilot sits much smaller than a flitter! As you can see here:



The only ship in the game smaller than a flitter is a drone. So a scale cockpit and pilot in the Tie would be so small that you couldn't even see them with the game camera. It would also add lots of polys for absolutely no return.

So the short answer is; yes I could do that, but what's the point? You wouldn't see it. Sorry. []

Hey MajorTom, do you think the above has anything to do with why Shane's spiff won't work, and why all the EoC ships seem to have been scaled up after they were made? Maybe the artists made all the ships and then the programmers told them that the flux engine wouldn't work with anything smaller than x size. But they wanted to keep the really cool feature of being able to see Cal at the controls so they just scaled everything up a little. I think even the debris is at least Cal sized.

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Shane says his spiff does work in the single play game now. I just can't get it to show in MP because it crashes (!) the game.

That may have to do with the MP engine:
I'm guessing it uses single float precision where the SP engine uses double float precision.
The MP worlds are much smaller so single float would work theoretically. However that may have a side effect concerning the size of models.
The original sized debris stuff did show in MP but I had to scale it up around 55 times original size to make it approximatly the size of a city class freighter. In SP the same debris stuff looks much larger. So, we may also have a different iDirector focal length in MP too. I dunno?
Anyhow, I'm assuming the tie fighters will be the smallest ships(?)
so it's good that you're doing them first (for testing purposes)

It would be so cool if the spiff would work. 'cause then you could leave your ship in a suit and do (First Person) EVA-Battle with other pilots (storm troopers ect.)

Have Gun, Will Travel

Hmm, that's interesting stuff.

It's funny, I didn't realize just how small these ships were until HempMonkey asked about the cockpits.

btw - a while ago, in the interest of realism and scale, I set the the Flux.ini icInternalCamera property field_of_view to 0.61 radians (about 35 degrees). I don't see much of the cockpit anymore, but when a big ship flies by; man, it's huge! The cap ships are way more intimidating when they actually look their size. People always try to set a camera's fov to the entire field of human vision, but peripheral vision on the computer screen doesn't translate very well. Everything ends up looking far away. Thought you might want to try it and check it out for yourself.

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Originally posted by Second Chance

Thought you might want to try it and check it out for yourself.

I'm pretty familiar with it, I messed around with the field of view, focal lengths and zoom stuff in iDirector a lot when I did the cutscene scripting for the Dogs of War intro movie.

The problem with the spiff is not that you can't see it. It just crashes the whole MP game. [xx(]

When do you think you'll have a playable version of the Tie fighters done?


Have Gun, Will Travel

Oops, I didn't mean change the FOV to fix anything. I just meant to say check it out for fun. While we're on the subject, did you find changing the focal length of the internal camera to have any effect? I haven't, reguardless of what I set it to.

About the models, I've got the LW texturing method down now. I've spent a lot of time lately working on textures for the Falcon, but I'll get back on the Tie's today. I guess I'll just wrap up the current model and send the files to you, then work on surfacing and texturing while you're setting it up for the game. Sound good?

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You can make the internal camera zoom in and out as seen from the player perspective (or from any other camera) by calling iDirector.SetFieldOfView after calling iDirector.SetCamera. The camera that was selected remains at the last fov value given until you re-set the fov.

There are 3 different internal cameras. I never bothered to test if the value in flux is for all three or only 1 of them. In pog you have to set the explicit camera you want to change anyhow.

Maybe the developers didn't use the flux value to re-set fov. (although, I've never seen a command to return the fov.)
The value in flux could therefore (theoretically) be reset by hardcoded values in the different scripts when they are initialised during the game.

When you get the Tie done send it on. I'll set it up and we'll see what happens.




Have Gun, Will Travel