My feelings on the Star Wars mod.

IIRC someone (Ericman?) once said you can scale collision hulls up in the .lws too

Nope. I do not believe the scene files even reference the collision hull at all (its assigned in the template file). So the only way to chage the size of a collision hull is to open its *.lwo in lightwave and scale it.

I am sooo impressed! And hats off to flux for making it possible.

On a nostalgic note does anyone else remember the DS trench game that was on the Commodore Pet, I wanted to play that pretty badly too.

Jumbo

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Originally posted by Shane


The culling is an issue. As you approach the DS, it suddenly 'pops up' at a distance of 200 km. Of course, at that range it nearly fills the screen and kinda breaks the illusion.

Just did some testing and found something interesting:

The server app in the MP game apparently doesn't cull any objects at all (not even dynamically placed sims)!
So, you can put something like the deathstar way out in the distance and adjust the brightness accordingly so it shows up and can be targeted on the client. The client apparently doesn't cull the map objects that are read in per the map ini either, (I guess because at the time they are read in, there is no player on the map anyhow.)




Iwar2 Multiplayer Fan Site

Turns out culling won't be a problem in either the SP or MP game.

The collision hull, however, will. [xx(]

To stay within the poly limits for the collision hull, I'd have to reduce it to a shape which would be useless (basically removing the trench). Not good. Over 248 polys and the model won't display at all (the 1$ HUD-range error).

What about this solution? I split the model into two different parts (model and CH) and then attach them via dockports. One model would be the orb itself, the other the trench. This would enable me to stay within the CH poly limits. Both could be icShip and use a null placed at the center of the model to dock (via POG) before the player sees them.
MajorTom (or GrandpaTrout): Would this work? Can you forsee any problems with this approach?

Thanks for all the input on this everyone.

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Hmmm. The problem is letting the player pass through the collision hull to get into the trench. Or (very possibly) I did not understand the solution well.

If you split the model like an orange cut in half, and did a collision hull for both top and bottom sides. (basically made each one a seperate ship) then did another section for the trench. All three could be joined up by pog (or just placed very close together in MP).

If your trench is going to have any detail, bridges, or turrets (like the old arcade game), then it might be good to break that up into a few pieces (I have this skill for making simple things impossibly complex and undoable so beware..)

Pog could assemble this item, even without dockports, if it new the exact offsets all the pieces needed. Dockports just get rid of all guess work and let the Lightwave user do the alignment.

This should be good practice for building small moons and planets...
-Gtrout

Shane, I hope you don't mind. I couldn't see the pictures very well (EoC screenies are always too dark), so I took the liberty of adjusting their levels in Photoshop.

This looks like it could very well be one of the coolest things to ever happen to EoC. I'm glad you thought of it. [8D]









That is truly awsome!

Before you ask SecondChance, I used the 'most commonly' agreed size of about 115 kilometers diameter.

Any chance you could make it the more accurate 160 km? []

I agree with GrandpaTrout on the components.

Nice, nice work Shane.

Oh, and I almost forgot my feelings on the Star Wars mod: I'm really glad this mod is being made. For one, it gives me an excuse to do some modeling I wouldn't normally do for myself. But even more importantly, it seems that there are many old EoC issues that are being addressed by this mod, and being solved! This mod seems to be opening doors that have consistently been a problem. For example; the disruptor gun and bot issues to name two. I think MajorTom deserves a lot of credit for putting in so much time and effort, and really coming through for us. I think when this mod is finished and documented (MT, you are documenting your progress right? I sure am.) it will make the creation of other even more unique mods just that much easier.

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