I-War 2, EOC, 2-D

Interesting. It's not my kind of game, but I see these top-down space games regularly on Space Game Junkie, so there is definitely interest and a market for this.

@7upMan I couldn't market this, unless I changed the ships and story to something else. THat is something to think about.

@IronDuke It is actually a bit easier than you described. The dimensions of the ships and stations are also in the .ini files. It is possible that the models are not exactly to scale, so the dimensions in the .ini file are used to scale it correctly. This is exactly what I am doing in my game as well. It is interesting that you described the .ini file as object files. That is exactly what they are! I have similar objects in my code that do all the same things.

The dimensions in the ini file do nothing right now! They are probably collider dimensions for if there is no collisionhull specified in the file, except that they got ripped out for some reason, and in the vast majority of cases, do absolutely nothing. At that point, I think they just left them in for reference. They are not even accurate; don't use them!
Example: in the sims/ships/navy folder, the advanced_patcom_mk1 and heavy_corvette_mk1 both have these dimensions:
; Dimensions
width=80
height=70
length=120
Seriously, I tried setting them all to 1 on a ship, and it did absolutely nothing at all. They're kinda pointless really; I never did figure out what they were for for sure.

--IronDuke

I see, thanks for telling me. Yeah, I thought I heard about some issue with measuring ships once. So, are the dimensions in the Acts/ships section accurate? The section says that the Flitter is 4 meters long, and according to the Flitter's .ini file, it is 4 meters long.

Also, according to the acts/ships section, the ComSec has a mass of 110t, and the SNRV has a mass of 288,290t, but they both use the standard thrust array. I am assuming each type of thrust array has the same strength. When I set the ComSec's enginePower to feel right (10), the SNRV can barely move... The Alpha class fuel transporter's mass is 446,500t, and has a heavy thrust array. The fuel transporter's movement feels right when enginePower = 100 or more.

If I have to measure all of the models, perhaps I can create an upload a table of lengths to clear up some of the issues.

I'm not entirely sure what you are referring to by "Acts/ships", as I can't find a folder called "Acts." But I do know that the flitter is supposed to be 5 meters long. Whether it is or not simply depends on the model Trust me; the 3d model's dimensions as opened in a 3d modeling program are exactly as in the game.

Also, the ship physics are a little weird. You probably noticed that the object file for a ship lists the acceleration values, and that is what the ship will accelerate at. The various thruster systems increase that value by a percentage. The mass of a vessel is used for two things: to determine how much that value is decreased when docked to pods or other ships, and to determine how ships react to collisions. The I-War2 ship physics is simply that ships have their velocity increased by a fixed amount per second. There is no actual force calculation performed; otherwise, the game would probably have never worked on computers of the time.
Also, where are you getting these mass values from?

--IronDuke

P.S. I will be unavailable until Monday morning, just FYI.

I'm not entirely sure what you are referring to by "Acts/ships", as I can't find a folder called "Acts." But I do know that the flitter is supposed to be 5 meters long. Whether it is or not simply depends on the model Trust me; the 3d model's dimensions as opened in a 3d modeling program are exactly as in the game.

Did I say Acts/ships? I meant docs/ships. It is the page on this site that provides some basic information on all of the ships. There are also pages on weapons and other systems. Regarding model sizes, okay. So the actual models are scaled, not scaled in-game. How limiting. :silly:

Also, the ship physics are a little weird. You probably noticed that the object file for a ship lists the acceleration values, and that is what the ship will accelerate at. The various thruster systems increase that value by a percentage. The mass of a vessel is used for two things: to determine how much that value is decreased when docked to pods or other ships, and to determine how ships react to collisions.

I thought it was supposed to be a Newtonian flight simulator?! My 2-D game is officially more Newtonian than the original game. And now I have to deal with their inconsistencies to make it work right.

The I-War2 ship physics is simply that ships have their velocity increased by a fixed amount per second. There is no actual force calculation performed; otherwise, the game would probably have never worked on computers of the time.

I beg to differ. A force calculation can be as simple as adding two vectors. In a 3-D game, it would be quite difficult to calculate movement and reactions in 3-D space without attaching the velocities in all three directions in some way. Perhaps I-war 2 stores velocities locally, in which case each thruster could be simulated on each axis, and then converted to a global vector for use by other ships. My game stores velocities globally, and converts them to local for each ship. I hope this makes sense.

I got the mass values from the docs/ships section as well.