Questions RE: ship models

Most of these I can't answer for you, but:

4) No, turrets don't rotate.
5) Not the current models, but Ironclad should be able to tell you if you can add in your own animatable models/meshes with the upcoming mod tools.
8) There are 5 frigates, 4 cruisers, 4 capital ships per race.

64K polys should be way more than enough.

Textures are mostly 1024x2048 and 2048x2048 for capital ships, and 512x1024 and 1024x1024 for frigates.

Is it theoretically possible to have more types of ships available by having more than two ship-building facilities? And a more pertinent question to that would be whether the number of buildings and ships able to be built is limited by the number of slots for build buttons in each respective ship-yard? (I do hope that made sense.)

I can't give you a 100% complete answer, but we do know that we will be able to mod in custom ships/structures and such with the soon-to-be released mod tools. Until then, only Ironclad knows if there any limits to the numbers.

As an aside, they've also hinted that we should be able to mod the UI to some degree as well, so that might also allow for more room to put buttons in.

And yes, it made sense

No you cant blow bits off the models themselves. However there are after explosion debris.

You can make animated textures since the game already uses animated textures (look at pirates). We aren't sure if the coding for animated turrets is in game, or not. We will have to wait, and see for that.

Rough guessing conservatively 4000-8000 polys for cruisers/cap ships. 1000-3000 for frigates. 8k-10k for some structures. I dont know how, or if "Lod" (Level of Detail) meshes are used.

There are 15 ship slots total for each faction 6 frig (this includes scout and colony), 4 cruiser, and 5 cap ship slots. I dont know if more can be modded in, but there are some unused slots in the build menus. Again we will need to wait and see.

While the game supports multi-textured models, It is best to UV map it on 1 large single texture sheet (1024 or 2048 res). I find multi-texturing causes some problems when importing the model.

I was just looking at the textures. The Normal maps aren't standard. Any idea on how they're generated? It's using full 4 channel textures for normals, but they're greyscale rather than blueish...wahhh. I want regular normal maps! Havn't researched yet, but might have parallax in there for the alpha.

The other 2 texture maps seem to be specular+reflection, and diffuse+transparency

k, well to start
the model triangle limits are roughly what stress mentioned;
about 300-500 for fighters/bombers
1000-2500(max) for frigates
3000-4000(max) for caps and structures
texture sizes. Ships don't go over 1024x1024 (may be one or two that are 2048x1024 or 2048x2048)
planets and skyboxes were larger (2048x2048)
all that stuff with texture size you can find in the folders

Textures are broken up into 3 maps
-cl RGB = Colour A = Spec

-da R = team G = Self Illum B = Reflection A = Bloom

-normal maps are a standard nvidia direct x optimization. you create the maps with the .dds converter for photo shop. saved out with normal map compression. standard normal maps are based on basic mapping where the R channel would represent the x axis, G represents Y and B is the depth. due to the manner at which the dds format compresses files. The Red channel doesn't support as much bit information as the alpha. So we switch the red to alpha at export from Photo shop. The dds (nvidia)plugin does this automatically. Blue channel isn't really needed. We found through testing it didn't add to the detail. Even when it was there.

Hope that helps

by the way. I'd suggest using xsi to export due to the fact that you need to make a tangent map before export for models to look right in game.

you can of course make models at whatever res you need. 65k is a heck of a lot for a game model.

Good info, thanks. It'll be an interesting shift for me to go back to relatively lower-detail models - hopefully I can get stuff done on time for once .

Thanks a lot tristangoodes. Very useful info.

the poly limit is around 32,000 , it might be slightly higher. you can refrence multiple textures if you like, you just have to make clusters in xsi.

Currently ships have the following points:

Weapon points
Exhaust points
Hangar points
Ability points
Flair Points
Default Buff attach points

I think thats all of them...

As far as submodel damage goes, you can't actualy blow peices of the geo away but there are damage effects that kick in as ships start to get damaged (which can all be modified).

Keep your models under 10k, and you should be fine. Just because you can build 64k models dont mean you should. 64k would be a model i would use for rendering purposes only. Most RTS game models stay at around 5k to 10k max. Less is obviously better for performance. You can build a low poly model (3-4k), but with good texturing would think that low poly model is a 10k+ model.

I believe the damage points occur anywhere on the mesh's points (correct me if wrong). I see flames and smoke pop up randomly on the model when it takes damage.

10K is excessive in my opinion. You should probably never have to go over 4 or 5k poly's. Even then those would be for capital ships and they are very high. Everything is much smaller. Models that are low detail not only will run on more systems, but the texture will help in giving it the rest of the detail you might waste with extra poly's

I had been wondering about that (general RTS polycounts), myself... be nice to work with an engine that natively supports bumpmaps for once.

I haven't noticed any progressive or manual lodding? (other than the iconification of ships) if this is the case then the poly limit is much less than 30K, 10K is probably okay, unless you want lots of ships. I was able to use multiple 15K vessels in HW2 because of aggressive lodding that cuts the detail down drastically when zooming out (usually 3 stages with the first stage lopping off a good half at around 5 km, the next another half of that at 15km, and the last stage making capitals with around 1500 tris at 30 km.)

I guess only way to really find out is to try it acually import high poly modells and see how game engine and your pc handels it. But as friend of mine says it for game modelling, good texture saves crappy modell, bad texture brakes good modell

guys, the cap ships in since don't go over 4000 triangles.
I can tell you this for sure.

The iron engine can handle a lot. 10k models would work, but i wouldn't flood my computer with them. I believe multianna did that mod to test the engine. Had 20 000+ ships on screen without sins crashing. Just chugged his system to 3fps. He did that on the old Tech Battleship. That was around 4000 tri's. so that woulda been 80 000 000 tri's on screen without a crash. That alone is impressive. Again, his computer almost died.

If you want to have eve type graphics, I believe it could be possible, you're just not going to have a huge fleet, so mod the game accordingly.

Also, Sins doesn't support Transparency maps on the ships. Not sure if that can be changed with moding.

Are you sure? The pirates have a flag on the TEC heavy cruiser. Its a little green flag on the back and I believe it is transparent.

Tristan was one of the developers for Sins. He built many of the models. So yea i think he is pretty sure.

So what are the approximate ranges for the current ship? I'm presuming there's a step down, perhaps very roughly 1-2k for frigates and 2-3 for cruisers?

I posted that earlier, just read up to reply #7



ya, that flag you see is actually not part of the model, it's an effect, haha

Made some investigations thanks to Stannums' importer tool.

Polycounts;
(approx; TEC seems to have largest polycounts by a big margin)
Fighter/Bomber/Gunship= 550-1300

Frigate
Arcova scout = 1486
Cobalt light = 1539
Javelis LRM = 1837
Garda Flak = 1480
Krosov seige = 1494
Protev colony = 1459
(rough range of 1000-2000 methinks)

Constructor = 1988

Tradeship = 2700-3200

Cruiser
Perchirien Light Carrier = 1484
Hoshiko Robotics Cruiser = 2119
Cielo Command Cruiser = 1699
Kodiak Heavy Cruiser = ?
(range is about 1500-2500 I think)

(NB: there are a couple of 'frigate_turret' models, I'm not sure what they are; 1 is ~2100 and the other ~900. I've not seen enough of the game to determine, but I'm guessing maybe fixed guns?)

(NB2: pirate ships seem to have generally higher polycounts by 500-1000 than the main race equivalents)

Capship
Marza dreadnaught = 3104
Kol Battleship = 4021
Sova carrier = 3689
Akan battlecruiser = 4355
Dunov battlecruiser = 3847
(randomly selected a few other species, range appears about 2900-4500 polys?)

Planet modules have varying polycounts; the highest I've seen so far is over 7000 for the frigate yard. Installations seem to be about 3000-5000.

(intersecting faces are allowed, handily, which should make things a lot more sensible)

I think each model (ship) has an associated shield mesh object as well. Orientation - from the importer - is to have the front of the ship facing up in 3ds max.