Event Horizon

New forum, new ships thread

My latest one is done, you can grab it here

Excellent work, as always!

<low, long whistle> and comparing with the other ships i made... <hangs head in shame>

looks freakin' awesome!

Just a quick note to say that I figured out a workaround for my smoothing issues. By actually breaking the mesh up into sections, I can have different portions smoothed and still have hard edges between them. The only downside is that it bumps up the vertex count by a few hundred (the poly count is of course unchanged)... I don't know how much of a difference that makes to performance, if any. Anyway, some example pics:


Before, with smoothing applied over the entire mesh. Note the odd dark patches where it attempts to smooth between polys with a large angle between them.


After, with the edges where the mesh is broken up. (i.e. poly's do not 'share' vertices at the edges). Maybe not the best mesh to use as an example because it has a lot of edges at the back, but you can see the tops of the wings are smoothed well.


And finally, I tried to be a bit tricky and add some engine glow effects to the model.. but it didn't work because a) transparency didn't work as I expected! And b) the lighting needs to be disabled on that poly for it to look right.. ah well, worth a try

Is that last pic in-game?

Also, I have been thinking about adding an option for engine-glow polygons, but I'm not sure... is that pretty easy to add? I don't want to make the barrier for a ship to be too high so that someone would feel they couldn't make a decent ship if it doesn't have all these optional features. :/

But then, I guess if you can make a good-looking ship in the first place, a bit of engine-glow probably isn't too hard, huh!

Yep, it's in game.. there's supposed to be two semi-transparent polys there, I'm not sure where the other one got to.. I'm not entirely sure what's going on there really.

On my side of things it's pretty easy to add.. I added in those extra polys in the .obj as seperate parts, like:

o glow1
#vertices go here
g glow1

o glow2
#vertices go here
g glow2

o ship
#ship vertices go here
g ship

etc etc. That way engine glows could perhaps be left as optional, for new shipbuilders?

I was also thinking it would be neat if the overall transparency of the engine glow polys was proportional to the ships thrust, so the glow would come on and off.. But now I'm going off on a tangent again

p.s. Merry Christmas everyone!

Looks great Mike!

Merry Xmas.

Merry Christmas!

As to Mike's question about whether the extra vertices would slow things down, the answer is "no." I handle each vertex independently anyway, so that looks like a good, simple solution.

As for the engine glows, I'm thinking it could either be custom ones, or the ship could define 3D points from which the glows should originate, much as hardpoints are currently being defined, allowing there to be a default set of glows.

And I hope you all had merry Christmases, wherever you are!

Something new, just to prove I'm still around This is the starfighter for the Alliance fleet, the Wakerunner IV:



A tad generic, but I think it has nice rear and rear 3/4 views.

I'm in the middle of exams at the moment, so I probably won't get around to texturing it for a couple of weeks.

Cool. I like the geometry.

For texture, you may have picked it up from the few relatively poor ships I have done, but I think the Alliance ships should have a lighter look to them, compared to the industrial/sheet metal look of the Terran Empire ships.

Cool, that's just what I had in mind too. Terran Empire ships as a little bit older, mass produced and industrial-looking; Alliance a bit newer and slicker, although maybe slightly fewer in ship numbers; and Harriman Confederacy I was thinking of as crazy high tech with asymmetrical designs

We find ourselves in agreement.

mmm pretty...

Nice! Looking forward to exams finish!