fantstic work, if only you were a Halo junkie instead then you could help me out...

TFL,
Very impressive indeed. These models are some of the best I have seen. Great job. Very interesting how you got the particle effects to become part of the ship. Outstanding!

DANMAN

ManSh00ter wrote:


The problem I find is animation as opposed to rendering a gun pointing in the right direction i.e. you need things like pivot points to animate object on a stationary platform to go from rest position to pointing at the target.

What is frustrating is that the game engine already does the tangent and vector calculations for rendering the travel path of weapons fire, you need the game engine to also provide the angles on turret mounted pivot points.

It wouldn't suprise me at all to find the engine can actually do it already, but with no in game examples to use as a reference it requires Developer input I fear.

I have one more idea left to try, which is to use variables from the pipeline effect/pixel shaders within the particle system. In theory you could force a particle system mesh to point at different co-ordinates if it accepts the variables.

its not been too long since the last post, so hopefully you wont kill me for necro'in

has there been any progress at all on getting moving turrets? its a real shame they didnt include it in the game

Kenetor

nah no moving turrents. They couldn't get it work for some reason or another

That is so very awesome... You need more Karma!!!

Also, glad to hear that B5 is being worked into SINS!!!

I did some research on how to write High Level Pixel Shaders the hope being to create the illusion of turret motion.

The conclusion I reached was that I needed to input co-ordinates on relative and world positions in order to calculate the angles/tangents etc of a turret relative to the target and position on a ship mesh. With no way of knowing which varables to use from the game engine or even if it was possible I drew the conclusion that it was not possible to achieve as things stand (or it was simply beyond my skill to create).

This type of information and calculation needs to come from the game engine as far as I can see it cannot be modded or added on without developer support.

I also approached the HW2 community to understand how turret animation works in HW2 in the hope I could translate some of the code or techniques into SoaSE. What they told me was that turret animation and calculation is locked inside the game engine, which kind of re-inforced my earlier conclusion.

I am not suprised IC & SD had problems getting it working the geometry calculations involved whilst not demanding for a PC are complex to formulate, you can't just point a turret you have to animate its motion in atleast 2 planes.

The rotating hull of the Omega is very easy in comparison as it only rotates in 1 plane relative to the mesh, rotates at a linear speed and does so constantly. Consider if you wanted it to move just 90 degrees then stop and move in the opposite direction for say 120 degress and stop. Again its a simple calculation for the PC or even the particle system but you need a method of being able to input that information into the particle system and thats where it all falls down I am afraid there is no method open to modification atm.

I would encourage everyone to request animated turrets as a future update to SoaSE, the new TEC Dunov is the ideal ship model to recieve this feature.

Animated turrets arn't difficult for a PC to do, if you actualy know the transform matrix math (I don't lol) you can 'easily' do a calculation like that, other than that you need to define a rotation point for the 'base' and the 'arm' (no diffrent than a point for a weapon but with a name like "Turret01-Base-Point").

It would be a LOT of work for a pretty minor feature though.

The problem comes in working out how the game is going to work with the turret - play freespace 2 to see that in action (ships being very annoying and underpowered if they don't face the right way).

Freespace even hard codes its turrets on a flat plane for ease (as in turrets could only rotate around the Z axis).



If anything I would like single part turrets that simply point towards the target but don't have any FOV changes other than the front/back/left/right currently used.

wow...looks awesome!  :CONGRAT: 

I think you will find that the tranform used in the SoaSE particle system only effects direction it does not control thrust or position it just maps the path.

What you need is some variable being calculated by the game engine to say 'rotate +40 degrees' 'rotate -80 degrees' etc etc. I frankly can't see how you can do that calculation externally and input the result dynamically.

You also have the hard point limit to contend with, a single turret needs atleast 2 slots which in the case of the Omega would be:

28 turret hard points + anything upto 20 more for navigation lights/pylons + the rotating hull + weapons.

FOV and fire-arcs  :HOT: don't get me started   

Yeah the particle system can't handel turrets.

After seeing your B5 ship yesterday, I was inspired to use abilities and particles to combine Phase and Psi planet module meshes... ...and ended up with some interesting beasts... ...but they like to crash into each other through their "added" parts

It's just plain awesome to see ships rotate (good work TFL!)

FYI,
I am also in thr process of trying to figure this out. I am trying to get turrents and other such animations for the ships. If I am actually successful, I will post all my findings and procedures here. Great job so far TFL!

DANMAN

This technique lends itself perfectly to add-on components for ships and structures that are upgraded or researched...

Here's a 'Mesh-Lego' outpost...

Remember guys that the particle system objects are considered by the game engine to be effects and not solid objects. You have to be careful not to make things too large as the probability that a solid object will pass through it and ruin the illusion becomes greater.

You can also use this technique for layering, first if you take Helioforge's experiment which has essentially stacked several meshes vertically on a station structure...

Now consider the classic Star Trek Borg cube and picture it made up from three of four cubes each one slightly larger than the last (in a kind of Russian doll arrangement). The result would be a much deeper 3D object than a single bumpmapped cube, you would be able to see a reasonable way into it.

Yes this is true, since collision detection doesn't apply to the affects

This allows you to make a big spaceship with giant gears that can swing around and eat other ships, and when the enemy ship is inside your ship-eater, it grinds up and explodes, with a mess of debris...

That would be an awesome use for this technique!

 

Okay this is a major necro here, but since we all want turrets if possible, I'm kinda putting this out here so DANMAN actually has to say something.  Even if its just "^%&^%&^^% HARDCODES!!!!!"

A rotating satelite dish on top would be more doable though, as the turrets would have to actively point at their targets (in my experiments, the mesh-overlay drained too much processor power to be worth it on my turtle system, it's not that it took up rendering time, but it took up extra buff time, so it should be saved for the major effects)...

For now, I advise people to just design around it. Avoid straight-out turrets, instead use things such as missile pods, coaxial guns (they run the length of the ship or are bolted into place by design) together with offensive abilities which you can constrain to fire only when the ship is facing the target, or weirdo alien spit-pods and turrets with no obvious barrels. It's not a perfect solution, but it helps with the overall believability of combat.

Hmmmm.  ManSh00ter, any chance of a progress update on the Xin?

Sure, sure, I am working on the next batch of units and structures right now. I am working on painting textures for the new Planetary Gateway, have already finished the new and improved Anti-Fighter Drone (the old one will be relocated to the exalted position of a Construction Drone) and have the concept for the Attack Cruiser Mk II... should be up next week at the latest. And there will be plenty of weirdo alien spit pods to gawk at!

Yaaaaayyyy!!!

 

Weirdo alien spit pods for everyone!

Do we know yet if animated turrets are going to appear in any of the planned expansions?

No word on that as far as I know. But since it would require an overhaul of pretty much every ship in the game, I assume not. Can't be sure though.

Interestingly enough, vector calculations are already in. All you would need to do is make a constant particle emitter which would contain the turret mesh and use the vectors used for projectile particles to simply point at the target by aligning its central axis along the vector, simmilar to how you can align particles to face along the vector.

Sadly, we don't have such a particle emitter.

so, basically, it is currently impossible for Sins to have working animated turrets?

Wow....that kinda sucks . Bah, oh well. It will eventually be possible.....eventually.