SE:V Shipset Questions
 

As soon as Malfador put up their SEV Empire Styles page I started work on one of my own, but I've run into a few problems already. If someone can provide some insight I'd be very grateful.

- I'm confused as to the aspects of Organic and Crystalline races' shipsets. From what I've read it seems that Org/Crys races either have:
An entirely new set of ship hulls/models, or
Texture file changes for all hulls/models, or
Additional units only unlockable through their race tech, or
Organic and Crystalline races cannot choose normal tech.
If I want to make my shipset fully compliant with any tech/race setup I choose to play will I have to make 102+ models? (18 (base designs) + 16 (optional size variants) + 34 (full organic compliment) + 34 (full crystalline compliment + whatever tech-specific hulls exist, if at all))


- How does scaling work? I know that if you don't provide the optional heavy/light variants the game will automatically scale the model to the correct size, but does the game scale standard ship hulls? If we can set our own hull sizes, I imagine that some abuses of this would lead to unfair gameplay (imagine SE:IV planet-sized on the tactical map starships) or just crummy-looking shipsets (fighters and dreadnaughts are the same size) If we do have to scale our own, could someone provide some numbers for us?

- Is there any way to test the compatability of your ship outside of the full version of Starfury?

- What are the polygon limits for ships? If there aren't any, what should we be shooting for? What will run well in tactical battles?

- Will there be any helper programs for shipset designers? I 'm having nightmares about having to open SEV and set up a tactical battle to test if my firing arcs are in the right place, or my engine glow is on my engines, or going into the design screen to make sure that inventory box #32 is in the right spot... over and over and over and over and over.

Thanks in advance,
John

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

If you want to, yes. More likely you could just include Organic or Crystalline texture. Its been stated that the org/crystalline stuff is optional.

Scaling- you can set whatever size you want, but if you make it too big or too small people won't use it. I doubt the appearence of the ships has any effect on actual combat. Can't really give scaling numbers.

For testing, grab the Starfury demo. You'll have to replace the default destroyer with your new ship.

Poly limits- look at the SF ships. I'd say a couple hundred polys at most.

SJ made a couple of helper programs for SF that might get ported to SEV.

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

You can just include alternate textures if you'd like to have your shipset look the part for Organic or Crystalline hulls.

There are a number of scale settings which I imagine could be abused, but anything off of the normal shipset will probably be shunned by players.

There is a viewer included that could help test placement of firing points or glows etc.

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

i was brainstorming with someone the other day, and we hit upon the idea of shipsets made of nothing but light points and glowy bits. perfect for all those silly energy-races that people like to play.

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

Organic and Crystalline ships (including units) are seperate hulls with seperate entries in the config files. In the default set they are using the same models and textures as the standard hulls. So the organic and crystalline races have 'distinctive' styled ships and units even before they have researched their respective racial techs. But this doesn't have to be the case. You can make ordinary 'technological' models and textures and dedicated organic or crystalline models and textures for a given race.

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

According to SEnet:

Like SEIV, the SEV vehiclesizes file defines primary and alternate model/texture files for each hull. In addition, it also defines a default, thus allowing for 3 possible file specifications. The file is set up to support the following additional models for ambitious shipset authors:

LightCarrier
HeavyCarrier
Baseship

Small, Medium and Light verisons of: Freighter, Drone, Fighter, Mine, Satellite, Troop, WeaponPlatform

Another thing to note is that the Organic and Crystalline racial traits in SEV provide specialized vehicles hulls. There are calls for specialized models and textures for every one of these vehicles, so a very ambitious shipset author could provide different textures in an "Organic" style for Organic races, for example.

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

i took a peek at the human destroyer and crusiuer in Starfury demo. the txt files are mia so can't say anything about them, but the destroyer model is larger than the cruiser model. but in game thats not true. the face counts are aslo nearly 50% less. Not sure the number of slots is to big an issue,since tonnage limits would keep that in check.

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

The text files are there- check SpaceObjects_XFiles.txt. The cruiser has a base model radius of 444.293 and a scale of 0.008, the destroyer 588.822 and 0.004, respectively.

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

SpaceObjects no such file in demo as far as i can see, have checked all directories. the model info provided, comforms what i sad about model sizes (i opened the actual .X files)
it seems you can create models any size you want then set scale accordingly.

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

Its in the Campaign 0- Backwater Blues folder.

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

hmm saw that then skipped over it for some reason, anyway the scaling numbers are completly different
destroyer model radis is 5.0 and scaling is .01 versus 588.822 and .004

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

Buh-what?

That's..bizzare. I pulled those numbers straight from the copy of Starfury on my disk.

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

That's just because the destroyer's model happens to have been made small in the 3d editor, so it only needs to get scaled down a little bit.

The other one is a large model, and needs to be scaled down lots more to make both of them look the right size in-game.

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

Is this an engine limitation, or a matter of playability for low-end systems? I tested a ship in the Starfury Demo that was ~1700 polys and it ran fine on my system. Right now I'm working with ships that are around 2k-5k polys, AFTER I've cleaned them up. I'm sure I'll be removing/simplifying more of the detail after I've had the chance to test them in-game, but I doubt any of them will go below 1k polys.

On a side-note, do the textures for the ships have to be 256x256 bitmaps? I've got textures that are 512^2 and 1024^2 in JPEG format that I want to use. The ships look horrible when crompressed down to 256x256.

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

SEV will have a LOT more ships on-screen at once, so keep that in mind. Its mostly a playability limitation as far as I can tell.

You can make the bitmaps bigger in Starfury, and even use multiple bitmaps (though I don't remember how to pull that trick off..), and SEV will probably be similar.

However if it isn't, design in 256x256. No compression issues that way.

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

*smacks forhead* I'm retarded..... the meshes that I have include 2-3 different models within the file, for various view distances (the game they were made for would swap models accordingly). I've been taking the close-in, high-detail models and hacking them up to reduce the polys. I totally forgot that there were already nice, low-poly meshes included that require no changes. Some of those 5,000 poly ships are now a fairly tame ~1,000.

I've spent the past week doing little more than improving my skill at welding vertices and re-aligning UVWs... Oh well, I guess this is how we learn.

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

That was kinda my question...I mean if you are using a puter that is over 5 to 10 years old, I can see this being a problem...If you have a standard run of the mill less than 2 year old puter, I cant see how a few polys here and there are going to make a difference. I mean how does this compare to homeworld in terms of polys?

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

Will there be any hard coded upper limit for the ship number per empire as it is in SE IV?

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

I'm not aware of a hard code limit at the moment. I have searched the settings.txt and found none either.

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

There are the same settings for maximum number of ships/units per player - which has the same maximums as SE:IV.

You can use any size texture you want. The only real reason for keeping the models economical on polys or textures small is for general playability.

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

Another question-
When exporting to .x format in 3DS Max 8 (using panda's .x plugin) I get a .x export, but in a very different format from the neatly ordered text files of Starfury. As a result (I believe) the Starfury demo won't load my ships. Any idea what might be going on?

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

X has a couple different formats- one is Binary, one text, one compressed IIRC.

Check to be sure you're using non-compressed; that might be the issue.

Also, if I remember right the starfury demo disallows most modding. You have to replace the existing Terran Destroyer with your own ship.

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

I had problems with the Panda plugin in Max 6 at first. The settings I used were:

Text format, only Normal and UV boxes checked, XYZ scaling of 6.

Don't worry about the jumbled format of the file, it will still load. Most of the problems I had trying to load things into the demo were caused by the changes I made to the other files (like the one that specifies where the hardpoints are). What ship are you trying to replace, the Terran Destroyer? Does it crash the game when you start a new campaign and try to select a ship?

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

Does starfury give you an error, or does the ship model simply not show up? If that's the case you might just have made the scale of your ship too small (by a factor of 1000 or so) Quite a few people, myself included, have been fooled by that. So check your game of starfury for any suspect pixel sized ships and try to rescale them. I hope that helps..

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

Some good news:
I got the ship to work in SF, although inconsistently.
SF will load the ship in the ship select screen without complaint, everything looks good.
It'll load the model in-game, too, but not without an error box that reads "Error loading file: [texture pathname]" - but it'll load the texture just fine anyway.
Occasionally I'll get a error message after loading that reads "Steam read error" and the game will freeze completely.

All that aside, if anyone has my setup, these are the settings I used:
3D Studio Max 8
Pandasoft's DirectX Exporter ver. 4.8.63.0
File > Export Selected
[3DS Max Objects] - Mesh Definition, Materials, Inline, Optimiz mesh = normal, Geometric, Mesh Normals, Mapping Coordinates
[Textures & .fx Files] Convert texture Map, Use full pathname, White diffuse override (texture), Format = Bitmap, Overwrite = Do not overwrite
[X File Settings] - DX File Type = Text, DX Frame = Sub frame hierarcy

This is just a test ship I threw together to figure things out (and teach myself to UV Map) the texture file is pretty large (maybe that explains my texture error?) but it still runs.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...051/SFTest.jpg
(The ship is banking towards the viewer, kind of hard to tell I think.)

Re: SE:V Shipset Questions
 

Very nice and interesting ship design http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

I'm afraid I can't help with the errors.. I'm using blender myself which does not seem to have all those fancy export options so I'm clueless as to what the problem might be.

I do remember hearing that size of textures and number of polygons should not be a problem for the game engine, it would just slow down the game, but it wouldn't produce errors.
(David gervais once said he had a model of 30.000 polygons he got of the internet which worked fine in starfury)