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Messages - Tartiflette

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3496
Suggestions / Re: Modular ship design?
« on: May 27, 2014, 10:54:05 PM »
 Kerbal Space Program, StarDrive, The Mandate, Deep Space Settlement, Galactic Princess, Kinetic void, Interstellar Drift, Space Engineers, Era of Guild, Slower than Light, to some extend Limit theory, if the development is not completely halted: Tannhauser Gate

I'm curious as to why it's never been done.
Nope, I don't see what you mean...  ::)
spacesimcentral.com is a good place to ask about any and every space game if you want.

3497
A wild half normalized Onslaught appear:

You may want to know that the effect is more visible animated, with missile flying over for example. Still, it is subtle to stay close to David's art.

3498
Suggestions / Re: BarrelGlow
« on: May 25, 2014, 02:47:34 PM »
I definitively second that! Especially the animated glow part.  :P

3499
Modding / Re: Spriters judgement thread [non-sprite art allowed]
« on: May 25, 2014, 02:33:45 PM »
well for the glow I... wait a minute where's my glow, I LOST MY GLOW!...

This is better.
So the glow could be integrated directly in the part, all as one animation, and no "game" glow.

3500
Quote
What type of workflow and tools would you use to make the ships 'look great'?
Use something like 3D Coat, zBrush or even Sculptris to make the normal maps with, rather than Photoshop; use a parallax shader with multiple materials rather than a simple normalmap shader to convey different material properties, such as self-illumination and metallicity. 
Sure i would look better, but you'll need a whole day per sprite(unless you ave very fast), and there is more than 80ships ingame right now, plus the weapons. And there would be the issue of mods: I highly doubt every modder can sculpt. Since a flat ship next to a "normalized "one would look weird, it would divide the modding community in two. The opposite of the plug-n-play philosophy of shaderLib.

This test was just a proof-of-concept of a simple pipe anyone could use to get normalmaps for his ships. But in the end, it mainly convinced me that with materialmap, we could get most of the benefits of normals for a tenth of the work.

3501
Modding / Re: Spriters judgement thread [non-sprite art allowed]
« on: May 25, 2014, 02:00:36 PM »
okay, corrected first gun, without the useless loading animation, plus a second one:

(dammit, why all my animations so much faster when played in a browser? This is driving me crazy :-\)

3502
Look a bit better on the Paragon:

Still not convinced it worth the effort, but it's definitively doable.

3503
To add some precisions:
I generated the normal map directly from the sprite, but if possible weapons mounts and hull should be treated separately, as right now they deform the armor. A height map shouldn't be necessary unless your lighting is inconsistent, or you have some strong orientation you'd like to keep (like say, the neutrino Unsung arms that will probably be interpreted as flat instead of inclined)

It's a time consuming process, but not difficult at all given the tools we have nowadays. Although that also mean if it takes one hour to convert a capital ship, it won't be much quicker to do a frigate (and I'm not event talking about every frames of an animated sprite ><)

In the end, there is no big technical hurdle, it's more an aesthetic choice.

It'd be a great feature, but..... that Conquest's normal map is far too smooth & curvy; makes it look almost organic. It needs more flat surfaces and hard edges.
Sadly there isn't any automated way to generate normal maps without this, not at a sprite resolution anyway. And I agree, I'm not really convinced by the effect right now.

3504
Mods / Re: Scy [23/05]
« on: May 25, 2014, 03:06:36 AM »
I love your massive built in ship weapon animations, would love some help with one of mine if you are willing
Sure I can help, animating sprites is mostly about careful preparation, moving parts is done pretty quickly then.

3505
Modding / Re: Spriters judgement thread [non-sprite art allowed]
« on: May 24, 2014, 12:02:36 PM »
Weapon spriting is much more painful and difficult than I had anticipated, but I think I'm finally getting there.

No specific name for now, but you can think of it as a medium sized Mjolnir, with a much shorter range while keeping most of it's punch.

I'm not sure I'll keep this whole loading animation... After some thinking I find it a bit showy and because of that, it does not look very sturdy.

3506
Mods / Re: Scy [23/05]
« on: May 24, 2014, 02:42:11 AM »
Well, the brutal solution would be to have a lightning fast shuttle on this ship. And there would be also issues if the Euryale retreat while you are in command of an other ship.
Well I'll tackle this problem in time, for now, back to weapon spriting!

3507
Mods / Re: Scy [23/05]
« on: May 23, 2014, 03:41:53 PM »
Precision Gear - I don't think it's currently possible to give bonuses to specific weapons, so there's no way to only apply the effects to turrets.
EMP Nova - Shouldn't be too hard. You might want to make sure the AI never uses this while the (allied) player ship is in range.
Retro Boosters - Cool idea. Writing proper AI for it might be tough as there's no way to ask vanilla AI when it wants to disengage. I think it's doable though.
Overload - Hey! I'm planning to make something similar  :)
Drone Launcher - Sounds like you want custom behavior for these drones. Could take some work depending on what you want and how picky you are.
Active Electronic Warfare - You might have trouble convincing the enemy AI not to ignore the drones with their main weapons.
Drone Bays - I don't think ships can launch more than one type of drone. Might be able to bypass this with hackery.
Phase Teleporter Cannon - Awesome  :D
Emergency Thrusters - Might be difficult to make the ship move correctly while the engines are offline. I can't think of any good, clean ways to do this.
Missile Factory - Shouldn't be too much trouble.

I believe most of my ideas have already been implemented in various mods, or I saw something approaching.

Precision gear: I don't need to apply this only to turrets since the ship only has turrets! (Am I clever...) And FlashFrozen already did exactly that with his Maul.

Drone Launcher: I'm pretty sure I saw that someone made a missile weapon that launches drones, so I don't worry much for this one.

Overlord: It's the one I'm worry the most about, I hope it won't hit some hard coded stuff.Scratch that, I've been informed that the function already exist in Dev mode...

Active electronic warfare: A drone with the sprite of the ship should do the trick for the players. As for AI, if I flag the drone as a capital ship (or push up whatever the AI uses to judge the power of a ship) shouldn't it target it? I mean, can I launch a Capital ship from an other ship?

Drone bays: It's a bit early to promise anything but in fact I originally intended to make three declinations of each ships, scouting, warfare, and defense. Each one would have had his specific drone type.

Phase teleporter: Yeah, I almost build the whole faction just for this one!  ;D

Emergency thrusters: I doubt there is an easy way to do this. Maybe it will fire up automatically when your engines are shots? Giving you few seconds to generate an escape vector...

3508
Mods / Re: Scy [23/05]
« on: May 23, 2014, 03:18:27 PM »
yeah i noticed that name collision to,
since you use Medusa & her 2 other sister's name then why not change it to "gorgon" ?
Because indeed I used her two sister's names? I agree I should change the name of my Medusa to gorgon, but then I would have to fin another name for the Stheno and Euryale... Sure it is a detail, but you may have noticed already, I don't like mismatched details.

(okay, I'll change the names, at least I will not have some clashes with Blackrock Driveyard ships)

Well, way back when I made the ship I considered Shteno, but I changed it to "Stenos" (which is also like part of the latin name of a dolphin species, Steno Bredanensis, and latin animal names prop up everwhere in BRDY) so I wouldn't worry about that one.
The one I didn't dare to use was Karkinos, since it is your main capital ship!

3509
Mods / Re: Scy [23/05]
« on: May 23, 2014, 10:55:13 AM »
Yeah, I know. I only use mythological beasts names for my ships and only in relation with their intended role, and "medusa" is fitting too well to throw it away (you know, turning fleet that face her in useless lump of metal)... Since the Scy were isolated, I could argue that they didn't known the name was already used, but that would be bad game design.
If I recall right, Sthenos is also used by Blackrock, and I thought there was a third, maybe Lamia or Hydra, I'm not sure. But I'm pretty sure that I already saw some ships sharing a vanilla name in other mods so I guess it's not a big problem.

3510
Mods / Re: Scy [23/05]
« on: May 23, 2014, 10:18:41 AM »
@Helmut
Yep, everything has been done in photoshop, although it sometimes has been a chore.
As for inspiration, indeed I'm really influenced by Homeworld (my favorites spaceship designs, especially the unused ones) and I closely inspected FlashFrozen's ships in search of inspiration and spriting tricks.
I'm ready to give a hand at animating, I can also share some tips and tricks to animate faster... But like in every artistic craft, the motto could be "precise observation, careful preparation, strong patience, and the most important: self criticisms!"

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