Space Flight Sim Dev Thread

[danimal']

Geodav - have an example of what you mean by the mini jump? I'm old enough to have played old Wing Commanders, TIE vs Xwing, but although I was around when Elite was out, I never got the chance to play it

The reason we've adopted jump gates is pretty simple, allowing you to actually view the solar system as you fly by it is fun and really adds to the sense of exploration. Simply "warping" to a place really detracts from that sense of a cohesive world. As much as people complain, if you took WoW and removed the flight paths and animal travel and simply warped everywhere, the world would be far, far less immersive.

Update
I fully 1/4 scaled everything properly: player and vehicles, collision, controls, speeds, etc. Rescaling the player took a bit more work than anticipated and my current solution is a bit hackish, but I'll clean it up later (I'm currently modifying a UTclass, something I'm not happy with but redoing the code paths is unnecessary work for right now).

Scaling brought up several small side issues that I didn't expect. Playerstarts are based on the default height, vehicle spawns seem to as well. I naively thought I could just set the eyeheight, scale=0.25, it turns out to require quite a bit more!

[TheAgent]

The specular and normal map looks great. Keep it up.

[geodav]

i played "Elite" in the second half of the eighties on my amiga 500, i suppose "jumpping" is like warping, you didn't jump straight to the station you had a few mini jumps in which you also had to take out the bad guys before you could jump again, you got to remember things where very basic back then.
btw the crate is looking great

[danimal']

Update
I started doing "paint overs" of the crate, the idea is to get a sense of overall color scheme, this isn't a real "texture" it's just for previewing before committing to texturing. I just give it a 1 minute paint job (3d paint in Zbrush, Blender or Mudbox etc) and pass a couple of color options past Count to see what he thinks. The cool thing about these simple diffuses is he can then easily take them in Photoshop (because they're really just grey values) and play around with brightness, add color, etc and quickly render back ideas. Here's are some perhaps cliche gray sci-fi color schemes, I'm playing with some more outlandish color versions, but I think I'll leave the splash of color largely for the circle in the middle to have a nice color glow. Anyone's free to comment on preferences or what they'd prefer with the caveat that ultimately I decide

[shot]http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/921/captureopd.jpg[/shot]
[shot]http://img402.imageshack.us/img402/4350/capturenlw.jpg[/shot]

Agent - thanks, love your work over in Zombie land. There are no spec maps atm, just a specular power, which is why everything is over gloss/spec shiny-tastic at the moment. Just a clean normal map and single tone diffuse per area. This is just my process of evaluating before committing to full-on texturing.

[Count_de_Money]

One try with wall piece normal map. Since I'm on vacation these days I just can't get myself to finish the mesh, so this morning I decided to do a quick test in engine on a simple plane or this will never get done.
It's possible that this will not be the final look of the mesh (I might do some addition work to clean areas like corners), maybe we won't even use this specific piece, but still I was good for exploring workflow.

[shot]http://img594.imageshack.us/img594/6883/wallpiece1.jpg[/shot]

[Hellclown]

I like the darker crate better than the light one. It has a more industrial robust feel to it, like it might actually contain things that need to be kept safe from the vacuum of space.

[danimal']

Glad you like it b/c that's the one I'm here texturing in the background (slightly modified but its the same general color scheme). Honestly I haven't had much experience texturing so I've been learning in the background and sort of muddling my way through it, so we'll see how it looks in the end. Here's hoping

[Hellclown]

Texturing sucks, but like all things it just takes time to master. Can't wait to see the crate.

[danimal']

Here's the initial diffuse pass. I haven't masked and bloomed out the LED blue light, I also need to give the whole thing a "scratch pass", but you get the idea. Scratch tomorrow then I'm calling it good and moving on for now.

[shot]http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/2942/captureexn.jpg[/shot]

[TheAgent]

Nice and clean, me like!

[Hellclown]

Looks cool, but why are you starting with detail items? I would have done the big things that didn't require lots of detailing.

[Cryslin]

So many games on here. I leave for a few days and bam, 10 more games. UDK is really spreading it's engine like a Las Vegas hooker. I just wanted to say this is looking really good. Nice detail on the crate. Fits right into the game. Wonder how it opens?

[danimal']

Obviously it opens by pressing the big blue button! The reason I'm modelling a prop Hellclown, is because I haven't modelled in over a year, and eventually I need to model a hard surface ship, so I thought it would be a good warmup. It's the only "prop" I'm making for now, then I'm going to do some basic floor and wall panels. The idea is I'm going to make a very simple hangar, so floor/wall panels and throw in a few crates lying around. Meanwhile, Count's working on the overall station, he's doing a bsp blockout that we're walking around to see if we like the sizescale, eventually I'll incorporate my hangar into the overall base.

So hangar for me, then I'll move back to larger space, working on planets, sun, asteroids, etc. I do a little code in between art breaks, there's a ton more coding that should always be done. Thanks for the nice comments guys, I follow all your work as well, it's why I like the WIP forum.

[Cryslin]

danimal

I know if you press the blue button it will open, which is cool. I meant the animated transition from close to open. Will we see how it breaks apart? Or are these crates unable to open at all? Either way it's awesome to look at. I just think it would be cool to try to get that to work where you can actually open one. Maybe the ones with the blue lights, and the ones with the red lights, you can't open. That's so the player won't be able to open everyone in the game if you duplicate many.


email:michael@michaeljcollinsdreamart.com


-

[danimal']

Winwar, definitely no animation for now, I can't spend any more time on a simple crate. Here is the likely final in UDK, these are just screen grabs from the editor viewport. I need to do one more pass on it since I forgot two items, but this is more or less the final.

[shot]http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/7579/capturedi.png[/shot][shot]http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/8118/capture2by.png[/shot]

Learning to texture was full of mishaps on my part, I ended up re-doing parts several times (like when I figured out that my clever copying strategy had resulted in degredation of quality and lost a day's work). Good news is I learned a lot and am MUCH more familiar with how texturing works now. I actually think it looks pretty sexy for a crate! On to floor panels and walls, though maybe a break for a day, we'll see. Updated front page with the screen grabs and edits.