you  job is awsome ill have to take a look closer when i will com to the battle blades habilitie for the andromeda mod

This mod has quickly become the center of attention after the entrenchment release.  I think you should continue taking wacks at it bigbang.  It is quite popular on other forums too.

Not to take away from TFL's accomplishment, which is major, but has anyone seen the rotating lights on the advent starbase?  I haven't seen the tec or vasari starbases yet, but the lights on the advent base swivel around the perimeter of the saucer.  :)  It looks like the devs may be moving in TFL's direction after all!!  Nice work, keep it up, it could lead to a lot more animation in-game, which if it doesnt kill my low end pc, would be fantastic!!!

-Teal

No sign of proper turrets yet in Entrenchment , if ever a model needed spicing up its the Star bases its not that they look bad they just look devoid of life like a chess piece rather than a Star base.

Well, considering that they would probably need to rework every ship model in the game to accomodate animated turrets, I think its unlikely we are going to see this anytime soon. Maybe with Sins of a Solar Empire 2.

Bigbang, although there aren't proper turrets, I'd rather get the mod out there with /improper/ turrets and when the time comes, patch it with the proper ones!

ManSh00ter i've seen your ships, and there was one that had a weapon on it that looked custom built, maybe you could help bigbang out?

Well, all my ships have custom-built weapons, but no moveable parts. I avoided the need for turrets with weapons that have point emitters, like phasers in Star Trek, or no clearly visible barrels or other parts which suggest the exact direction a projectile should go.

As for using particle system for moveable parts, that's perfectly doable. Some of my test models are actually entirely made of particle emitters, because of certain properties you can achieve with particle meshes, like transparency.

Ah well you see Star bases being a new object and there being only three was the ideal time IMHO, becuase you could get away without having to revisit models with gun emplacements expect perhaps the Gauss cannons.

Dude this is one of the problems, who is to say that it is coming at all like ever? As for SoaSE 2 we have atleast 2 more mini expansions before then it could be easily 2012 before we even see a beta for SoaSE 2 assuming SDC and IC decide to make it as opposed to another project. There is absolutely zero credible information on this to date....

Hence "when the times comes"  In game I don't zoom in all the way to see the turrets moving around, I'm to pre-occupied killing!

Your work so far is AMAZING!  Don't let anyone else tell you different.  And you have a lot of support for your mod here:

http://www.b5tech.org/forum

And there are people willing to help with imaging, etc.  And some are good at 3d modeling. Just a thought.

If I recall correctly, Ironclad had 2009 pretty much covered as far as mini-expansions go... and in any case game sequels happen (if ever) after a certain number of years have passed, usually. Which is sort of good... imagine you spend a year and a half working on a mod only for the sequel to come out and beat you over the head and neck with new goodies... :p

Anyway, personally I am happy with the extent you can use the particle system to animate the models themselves. Its too bad about the turrets though, but what can you do. There is bigger stuff that comes to mind which I'd like to see resolved, like the ability to have moving ships during fights, or even refraction shaders. You can work around Superglued Turrets, unlike Superglued Ships.

Yeah superglued ships is right up there (and to many more important), I would think that is a more challenging problem because of the implications of RTS micro management paranoia amoungst the 4x dudes. At least with turrets its just a visual effect it doesn't alter the gameplay.

It should be possible to write a new shader, there are some good books around on the subject with code examples.

Well, a good 4X gameplay with some nice combat is Sword of the Stars and its two expansions.  Great real-time combat with moving ships and animated turrets, and very well done 4X strategic gameplay.  SotS is so good, especially with the expansions, that I, who hates turn-based anything with a passion, loves it.  I was planning on bringing two of its races over to Sins to show IC how real RT4X gameplay is done, but I decided against it since you just can't do 4X features and do them right in Sins.  Sadly, Sins has more in common with Supreme Commander than Master of Orion.

Ironclad, why don't you ask Kerberos Productions for help on how to do strategy games?  I'm sure they could help you out if they find time for it.  After all, they are a small company with only so much time on their hands to do things.

You can't really compare RT4X with true 4X games like MoM - the reason MoM can retain such a level of strategic depth and complexity is precisely because its turn based, just like SotS. It would be impossible to keep track of all those little details, even with AI managers, in real time.

As for shaders, is it even possible to write a new shader which would be accepted by the game? I know you can alter existing ones, but adding new ones?

Well, my main complaint isn't so much the gameplay but how IC and Stardock are selling it.  Its is excellent RTS gameplay.  Only problem is Stardock and Ironclad are marketing Sins as a RT4X which implies a much larger scope (think Imperium Galactica) not as a space-based RTS with some 4X elements, which just so happens to be how a lot of people would describe Sins.

Sins is a great RTS game.  However as a 4X it fails horribly.

Really you think so? I am not a 4X player myself so I can't comment there but the RTS gameplay/features of SoaSE in no way stack up against Homeworld2 there is just simply big chunks missing in SoaSE most notibly the point Manshooter was talking about with 'superglued ships'

I had always assumed that the foundation for SoaSE was 4X with a smattering of RTS added on top but it seems that may not be the case if 4X players are saying its a great RTS (which it isn't, well not yet anyway).

So is it a great RT4X?

hey i have been lookin over this thread for a bit now and i was wondering if i would be possible to use this technique to make deployable battleblades for the andromeda mod

like in this video http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=suwXkgLkzTg

a great some where betwen? maybe lol

Well, a 4X is typically much, much larger than Sins.  The tech tree is bigger, you have more racial variety, you aren't shoehorned into pre-designed ships, and generally you battle for an entire galaxy rather than one measely solar system.  For example, in a 4X, a fully teched player has to try to lose against someone with no techs since the teched-up guy usually has multi-dimension phasing meson pulse cannons and armor which sends impacts to a whole different dimension.  Not to mention his battleships are faster than your destroyers due to multi-dimensional hyperspacing.  In Sins, non-teched still stands a chance.  Where is my neutronium, my fusion guns, antimatter cannons, singularity warheads, antimatter engines, fusion drives for my missiles, etc.  If Sins is a 4X, it has the smallest tech tree ever in a 4X.  Not to mention devevlopers forcing you to use their unit designs is a very RTS thing.  Designing your own ships is a sacred and inviolate feature in a 4X.

You could make the blades extend and retract I am not sure how you would go about making them extend and then stop and stay persistent/visible.

What you would need to look for is an example in game where the particle system does that with another object or effect then analyse how it is being controlled. Something along the lines of how damaged ships emit fire and smoke which gets worse with damage and better with repair.

Is it possible to convert 3d models from one format to another with some success?

And check out this amazing re-image by Lemon Wolf from B5Tech.com

Yes it is possible AJFoster, at the end of the day pretty much all 3D models are based around the concept of polygons formed out of verticies in 3D space. Lemon Wolf has done a first class job there and wouldn't it be great if there was a game engine to render those models in real time

I suspect he used Lightwave, Maya or 3DSmax to create those shots.

You're a font of good pics AJ that Omega shot was very detailed indeed, we like.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Anyway as much as I like B5 technically this is a thread on SoaSE animated ships open to all, so in the interests of progress for all (including B5 mods) I have a question to pose to those ahead of the modding curve:

Q : In the PipelineEffect folder we see what appears to be Vertex and Pixel Shaders which I assume are compiled 'just in time'. That being the case can someone explain (preferably Craig Fraiser) in simple terms the difference between g_ViewProjection and g_WorldviewProjection?

Is it some kind of transform based on object vs. world space?

And more importantly or by inference can this be used to render particle system objects with the correct co-ordinates to point and object at a target in much the same way the weapons fire at the target?

....or does someone want to have a go and report back?

No takers?

Ok try this on for size, before an object is fully rendered to the display output it must undergo transformation from model space (i.e. its vertex co-ordinates in XSI or 3DSmax) to world space (i.e. the new co-ordinates within the game environement with respect to other objects). My very limited understanding of the graphics pipeline thinks this is the role of the Vertex shader.

Now we cannot manipulate an model and or any sub mesh objects in model space without using the particle system and based on experiments to date that manipulation seems limited to a fixed tranformation matrix or in other words we cannot apply much in the way of logic and calculations to the matrix.

But what about performing that calculation during its transformation into world space using a vertex shader?

Let me explain:

If for example you are recieving an input from the game engine as float4 Pos : POSITION; and the vertex shader is then multiplying this by a WorldView tranformation matrix to get the position in world space, why not change the POSITION before it gets transformed.

These are just chunks of HLSL code to illustrate

float4x4 matWorldViewProj: WORLDVIEWPROJECTION

struct VS_OUTPUT
{
  float4 Pos  : POSITION;
};

VS_OUTPUT VS(float4 Pos : POSITION)

float angle=(time%360)*2;

Pos.z  = sin( Pos.x+angle);

Now I might be barking up the wrong tree here but haven't I just altered the Z component of the position prior to its multiplication into WorldSpace, hmm now there is food for thought.

BigBang, I joined your forum.

As much as I dislike the fact that ships aren't maneuverable during attacking, a B5 mod would still be fun ^^

I'd be happy to help with any non-3d rendering that you need done, like images and tech trees etc.

Granyte forget about battleblades for a while that is a pretty complex undertaking, start off with something simple so you understand how it works. My suggestion is look at my very first post and try to repeat the steps I described so that you create a Pirate Cutthroat ship with an animated Pirate Skull mesh (taken from the Pirate Base) replacing the flag/screen effect on its back.

From there you can replace the Pirate Cutthroat with your own Andromeda mesh, then replace the animated skull with a battleblade and tweak the position and transform to suit the motion path. Personally I believe you will need one particle effect per blade, and the challenge of stopping the blade in its desired position is something you are going to have to figure out one possible suggestion is imposing a limit within the Vertex shader being applied to the blades.

There is virtually no information on the 3d pipeline effects so exactly how it all hangs together without seeing the source code (which unless someone disassembles it isn't going to happen) requires guess work and experimentation.

On the plus side atleast you can read the HLSL of the effect shaders and on the surface they do seem to be all there i.e. they aren't others pre-compiled and unreadable.

Whilst I am ranting on I discovered the other day why particle effects of any kind are not subject to collision detection, its actually quite obvious when you think about it. The reason is the effects are rendered through the pipeline outside of the core game engine and the results are not fed back they are pushed through the pipeline, in other words the collision detection system simply has no knowledge of the size and position of the particles.

kk ill try this thank alot