Andromeda Mod

I have absolutely no idea of how to model the battle blades for the Andromeda. The model that Shane downloaded has no battle blades and I don't know how to model shapes that complex yet. I tried searching for tutorials that might explain how to do things like that. My question is: does anyone know of any good Milkshape sites explaining how I could do this?

What's a battle blade? Can you post a link to a pic?

mailto:second_chance@cox.net

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The battle blades (whose use is unknown and hotly debated) are simple metal structures that rotate out from underneath some part of the ship during battle. When the battle is over they go back in. Another question I have is: Is it possible to get the battle blades to extend and retract during battle? I have a few ideas, but I'm not sure if they'll work.

• Have a key binding that switches between ships during game play. You could have a model with battle blades for battle, and then during regular flight, you could switch back to a model without battle blades.
• My other idea was, you could use a keybinding to add the battle blades to the ship when you want to (this doesn't seem like it would work)
• None of these require the rotation of the battle blades like in the show, because it is totally unnecessary, an probably quite hard to do.

Will any of these work, or will you have to simply have a ship with battle blades or without battle blades?

Here are some pictures of the battle blades (all captions refer to the picture below it).

The battle blades are fairly clear here.

Not real detailed here, butyou can see the battle blades sticking out along the bottom and top of the ship.

You can just see them in the background at the top.

The blade in the top right corner gives you a good idea of their shape.

Another picture.

They look pretty simple, but I can't figure out how to model them in Milkshape. Also, do you have to make a second side for an open cylinder? Ex. If you create an open cylinder (a cylinder with no top or bottom, just the outside) will it be paper thin in EoC, or will it not show up at all?

What are the "ragged" polygons that you get from reducing the polygon count?

With a complicated or highly-curved mesh, the plug-in which reduces the poly count can generate 'poly errors'; polygons which exist within other polys or has surfaces which intersect with other surfaces at a slight angle. Which creates a jagged-looking texture.

The situation can only be avoided by manually reducing the polys, but that requires hours upon hours of selecting two polys and merging them into one, trying to keep from creating non-planar polys. It'd be very tedious and time consuming.

EoC features avatar channels, which would animate your battle blades nicely. For an example, jump ingame and look at the tug as you press the forward thrust override key. The four engines move, rotating downward.

Building the Battle Blades: If you browse the forum, you'll see that the ships I usually build have very few curves. That's to keep the polygon limit down. A cube has 12 sides if constructed of triangluar polys. A sphere (if it's smooth at all) would require well over 300.

Adding the highly-curved battle blades to the highly-curved ship might well create performance issues. It's a lot of polys for the engine to render at one time (let alone display textures, shadows, light interaction, etc.).

You'll most certainly want to go with double-sided polys on the battle blades. A double-sided poly is just what it sounds like; it has a 'face' on both sides. The downside to building the blades from doubles is that there is no discernable 'width' to the blade. If you look at the blade from the side, you won't see anything at all.

But the benefit is the poly count savings. It would take far fewer polys. Like 75% less.

I would assume that Milkshape supports double-sided polys, but if you want battle-blade animation, you're really getting into the area where it would be more condusive to your model to watch Ebay for a copy of LW 5.6.

<font size="1"><font face="Book Antiqua"><font color="black">"Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. This was no disciplined march; it was a stampede-- without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of Civilisation... of the massacre of Mankind."
--H. G. Wells The War Of The Worlds</font id="black"></font id="Book Antiqua"> </font id="size1">

If you browse the forum, you'll see that the ships I usually build have very few curves.

Adding the highly-curved battle blades to the highly-curved ship might well create performance issues.

No kidding! [:0] Good grief William, I don't think you could've picked a more complicated ship (especially as your first) to get working in EoC, lol. But if you're willing... I'll give you whatever help I can. If this ship could be brought into EoC fully functional I have to say; I'll bet it would be mighty impressive to see. Shane's really one hell of an EoC modeler, if anybody can get your mesh to look good with minimum polys I'm sure he can.

How about some specs for this thing? We could start working up an INI for it (if you want). How many guns? What types? How fast? Blah, blah, blah...

mailto:second_chance@cox.net
The Ultimate Guide To Modding: I-War 2 - Edge Of Chaos (coming 2004)
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I was thinking about the engines on the tug when I wrote my last post, and I thought that it might be possible to make the battle blades rotate. I'm pretty sure that I can do most of the .ini files. One of the things that I wanted to see were Nova Bombs. On the show, they disrupt the forces that hold, say planets and stars together. When these forces are disrupted, the stars will go supernova, and destroy the planets if they aren't hit by the blast of the Nova Bomb. I figured that simply scaling up the explosions of the homing antimatter missiles to obliterate everything within a certain distance. If the explosion is too big will it freeze or slow down the game? I have most of the other weapons, because I liked the weapons in the Stormwing Destroyer mod. I wanted to use about 10 sniper cannons around the front of the ship, 5 on each side, about half way back. If they are just large or medium mountpoints, that should be fine. Is there a way I can change the number of weapons I have in the loadout screen, because I highly doubt that I have 10 sniper cannons. I wanted lots of missile launchers, two or three along the bottom, some around the edges, and the top. Another thing that I had been hoping for was to change the point defense turrets from gatling cannons to proton pbcs, or maybe particle-accelerated pbcs because I have a mod that will change the particle-accelerated pbcs to proton pbcs. Just having enough to cover an undefended areas will be plenty. Does it get complicated to create so many mountpoints? I'm not sure because I've never seen any of the files except for the ini's, which are pretty straight-forward, speed here... weapons here... cargo space here... etc. The one weapon that I'm not sure how to create, is one that doesn't really exist. This is a picture of the weapon and a good picture of the upper battle blades:

I thought that maybe modifying the flares so that you can launch them, and when they hit, they do damage. They would have to go fairly fast or else, like the gnat rockets, even grandma could avoid them in her sleep. It doesn't matter if I miss, it'll ba just like the real Andromeda who just saturates space with weapons fire, and eventually, the bad guys can't even move. This next weapon was cool in the show, but would be completely useless in the game, because although beam weapons are some of my favorite, they are pretty sad against any thing that has thrusters.

Powering up...

The beam.

There used to be a chair in the center.


What do I have to do to change the name from Southern Cross, or Iron Duke to Andromeda or possibly Andromeda Ascendant? Will I be able to change the point defence turrets to whatever I want fairly easily if I don't like the proton pbcs? I'll create as many of the ini's as I can today (on my time here in Canada cuz' the time on the forum is quite different from mine). Oh yeah, I almost forgot, I wanted lots of other mounts for different weapons. Does having this many mountpoints make it complicated? Can I create the mountpoints by myself?