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Author Topic: BattleFleet Gothic (Starsector 0.54.2) [ON HIATUS]  (Read 268410 times)

phyrex

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Re: BattleFleet Gothic
« Reply #210 on: August 20, 2013, 01:39:44 PM »

its either that or put them in a way that they cant be seen, as if they were inside the hull imo
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silentstormpt

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Re: BattleFleet Gothic
« Reply #211 on: August 20, 2013, 02:17:37 PM »

I really haven't done much on this mod recently. I'm still buggered about the sprites for the weapons. BFG ships, and especially Imperials one are the long, thin ship type and weapons seems oversized on them, it looks completely off to me and i don't have much ideas at how to deal with this problem.

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Here i reworked the Emperor class sprite with the weapons mounts and all.



And here with guns.

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Even with some very small turrets, it looks dumb to me (i borrowed Ironclads guns to show the problem). Any advice?


The ship scale should be higher, i don't see any other way besides that, also hardmount weapon batteries are really flat (in yellow), the turrets themselves are really small as you can see  weapon battery turret (in green) and that "lance?" turret (in red):

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For materials, check the mods dropbox folder we set up
« Last Edit: August 20, 2013, 02:21:37 PM by silentstormpt »
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Wyvern

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Re: BattleFleet Gothic
« Reply #212 on: August 20, 2013, 02:57:13 PM »

The ship scale should be higher, i don't see any other way besides that,
Or just make the weapon sprites smaller?  Take a look, for example, at the Antediluvians faction - something like that might work very well for these sorts of ships.
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Wyvern is 100% correct about the math.

phyrex

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Re: BattleFleet Gothic
« Reply #213 on: August 20, 2013, 03:27:23 PM »

The ship scale should be higher, i don't see any other way besides that,
Or just make the weapon sprites smaller?  Take a look, for example, at the Antediluvians faction - something like that might work very well for these sorts of ships.

i think they dont want to lose too much resolution on weapon sprites, otherwise they would have probably done it like erick already.
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silentstormpt

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Re: BattleFleet Gothic
« Reply #214 on: August 20, 2013, 04:06:02 PM »

The ship scale should be higher, i don't see any other way besides that,
Or just make the weapon sprites smaller?  Take a look, for example, at the Antediluvians faction - something like that might work very well for these sorts of ships.

i think they dont want to lose too much resolution on weapon sprites, otherwise they would have probably done it like erick already.

Exactly, it becomes specially "sad" when you have fantastic weapon sprites, only to make them have a "8bit" look
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Wyvern

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Re: BattleFleet Gothic
« Reply #215 on: August 20, 2013, 04:13:10 PM »

The ship scale should be higher, i don't see any other way besides that,
Or just make the weapon sprites smaller?  Take a look, for example, at the Antediluvians faction - something like that might work very well for these sorts of ships.

i think they dont want to lose too much resolution on weapon sprites, otherwise they would have probably done it like erick already.

Exactly, it becomes specially "sad" when you have fantastic weapon sprites, only to make them have a "8bit" look
But what's the alternative?  If you make the ships bigger, that just makes the player have to zoom out further to see what's going on, at which point, what have you gained by having higher resolution weapons?  Is their appearance in the cargo screen that important?

There are only two other alternatives I can see: one, make the ships use hidden mounts (almost?) exclusively, or two, re-adjust the armament to more closely match the default Starsector design paradigm where ships just don't have huge numbers of guns.
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Wyvern is 100% correct about the math.

HELMUT

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Re: BattleFleet Gothic
« Reply #216 on: August 20, 2013, 04:41:33 PM »

Actually the amount of weapon is very close to Vanilla Starsector. "Only" 19 mounts for the Emperor class against 24 for an Onslaught (with Thermal pulse cannons). And even with less mounts, the weapons still looks wrongs on it. Shrinking weapons could be a solution but as silent said they don't look very good when they become too small. The guns used for my example are somewhere around 35x20 pixels and are already too big. The custom sprites i made for the weapons are closer to 80x50 soooo yeah...

The appearance on the cargo screen isn't really the problem but i would really have liked to show some nice weapons sprites with proper animations (the guns from the Fairy empire mod comes to mind). Sure, hidden weapons could work but that wouldn't be as cool as "real" weapons.

I'll try to increase a bit the scale of the ships. Not too much, they would be longer than most capitals ships but as they are very thin to begin with it shouldn't be too out of place. I remember some Neutrinos capitals ships are pretty huge, but still fit with Vanilla ships, so i'll try, and we'll see.

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Ravendarke

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Re: BattleFleet Gothic
« Reply #217 on: August 20, 2013, 04:43:44 PM »

How much do they need to rotate?
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HELMUT

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Re: BattleFleet Gothic
« Reply #218 on: August 20, 2013, 05:32:15 PM »

Hum... Probably 180° for the dorsals guns, 360° for the PD turrets and 90° for the broadsides. I heard that 90° is the narrowest broadside arc that the AI can properly handle, the same as the Conquest, for 0.54a at least. Some exceptions for the frontal guns like the Nova cannon, torpedoes tubes and some batteries who shouldn't be able to turn more than 5°/10° i think.

I'm currently trying to make some hardpoints version for the macro cannons on the side. Like in the picture that Silent showed us earlier, they will be mostly flat so it shouldn't be a problem. If it don't work, we could still make them hidden like Wyvern said.
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phyrex

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Re: BattleFleet Gothic
« Reply #219 on: August 20, 2013, 10:16:26 PM »

Maybe the mod could, by default, include a code or something to allow zooming out as much as needed (simply just take any zooming out limit the game might have) so that the player can just zoom out as the situation requires ?

I mean, the solution to this problem dosent seem to be in sprite size, is there something in zooming in/out that might prevent my suggestion from working ? (did i miss something ?)
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Okim

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Re: BattleFleet Gothic
« Reply #220 on: August 22, 2013, 12:12:35 AM »

You can make all of your weapons as hardpoints with 180 deg arc and just make a smaller sprite for it. In cargo you`ll always see the turret variant of the weapon.

Hardpoints are slightly more difficult to disable, but they have their rotation speed reduced to hell. This can be overcame by giving experimenting with various rotation speeds for the gun.

This is of cause if you are not going to use these weapons anywhere else (you`ll have to make ALL weapons as hardpoints).

HELMUT

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Re: BattleFleet Gothic
« Reply #221 on: August 24, 2013, 10:36:24 AM »

Hardpoints are slightly more difficult to disable, but they have their rotation speed reduced to hell.

Ah? I always thought that hardpoints were used for narrow firing arc but didn't influenced the rotation speed. Well, good to know. We'll have to test if 90° is too much for a hardpoint and if the AI go derp that way, if so we'll reduce the angle. The firing arc is more a problem for the AI than the player, and my knowledge in how the AI handle stuff might be wrong as well. Pelhamds and silent will be better judge than me.

Anyway, i tried some little things.

On the left is and empty imperial ship (i used WhoopieMonster's Gothic as a base), on the middle a ship fitted with guns (i used the Emperor's loadout, disregard the mounts emplacement) and on the right a Paragon for scale comparison. I precise that the imperials ships are supposed to be capitals classes, the biggest of the Imperial navy.

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So i made them bigger, but still reasonable in comparison to Vanilla. I made a small hardpoint version for the imperial batteries. And used shrinked version from Okim's mod for the turrets. So i think that's how i'm gonna do it. I'll rework my weapons sprites to make them smaller and more appropriate for the new ships and give a hardpoint version for the broadsides. In the end, i'll be forced to make them smaller, but i think that's ok, they were completely oversized to begin with and on top of that they looked pretty meh.

Of course i can also try to improve the hardpoint look if you think it should be better. However, it would still better if we could have a proper spriter for this mod. My skills don't make justice to the 40K universe.
« Last Edit: August 24, 2013, 10:38:35 AM by HELMUT »
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silentstormpt

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Re: BattleFleet Gothic
« Reply #222 on: August 24, 2013, 10:38:25 AM »

If you can get the Imperial weapons ready and at list one Imperial ship, i will start working on adding them asap
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silentstormpt

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Re: BattleFleet Gothic
« Reply #223 on: August 29, 2013, 06:58:03 AM »

Ive noticed that those side weapon batteries are pretty much universal for I.F. ships:

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This might help when making them, by creating those platforms, you can kitbash several variants on the same ship Class and it can be used on the majority of ships.
They come in different sizes, 4 Cannons and 6 Cannons (the weapon batteries) for the cannon placements its 2 and 3 Large Cannon Placements.
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Some Light Cruisers and Frigates use the Long sized one (6 Cannons/3 Large Mounts)
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Cruisers,BattleCruisers and BattleShips use the Medium sized ones (4 Cannons/2 Large Mounts)
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http://www.wargamerau.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t102598.html
« Last Edit: November 03, 2013, 06:07:23 AM by silentstormpt »
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silentstormpt

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Re: BattleFleet Gothic
« Reply #224 on: August 30, 2013, 10:06:29 AM »

IMPERIAL FLEET

Imperial Ships side weapons:
1st) Weapon Batteries, these are hardmounted weapons that you can only see the cannon (can be a beam cannon or ballistic cannons);
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2nd) Lance Batteries, these are turretmounted weapons.
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3rd) Launch Bays, these are hardmounted launch bays that launch fighter when fired (these will work like Xenoargh fighters launchers);
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CHAOS FLEET

Chaos Ships side weapons:
1st) Weapon Batteries, these are small turretmounts that when compared to the imperial are much smaller (can be a beam cannon or a ballistic cannon)
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2nd) Single Lance Batteries, these is a turret mounted weapons with a single slot for a lance turret and lots of small turretmount anti-fighter weapons
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3rd) Dual Lance Batteries, these are 2 large turret mounted weapons
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4th) Launch Bays, these are hardmounted launch bays that launch fighter when fired (these will work like Xenoargh fighters launchers);
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All being used on different cruisers;
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On a imperial hardmount you need to set up only the cannon, however, every mount needs come with 1 cannon and part of the box to cover the hardmount slot. This will generate a problem when you try to mount a imperial weapon on another alien ship, to prevent this problem a schematic system can be used to "convert" these weapons into usable weapon versions for that race, to identify what race is a weapon is simply add their name prefix on the weapon name.
« Last Edit: September 02, 2013, 03:21:05 PM by silentstormpt »
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