Get Your Components In SE5!

[Ed Kolis]

Looky here!

http://www.malfador.com/whatsnew.html

You too can be an artist for SE5 - just send Aaron links to a few of your original component renders and he might bring you on to the art team to render components for SE5!

Also a new race pic at Malfador - this time it's the Jraenar

[Fyron]

Are you sure that is not the SS Voyager with a paint job?

[Aiken]

To arms! Err... I meant "To digitizers!"

[Ed Kolis]

<rant>
You know... is it just me or do the 3D rendered ships look rather... disappointing?
I mean, the ones in SE4 could be good looking because they were static bitmaps, but the ones in SE5, no offense to the talented art team, don't even seem to match Half-Life in terms of polygon count and texture detail...
Come on, this is 2004, our computers aren't THAT slow!
Run a mesh-smooth for crying out loud!
I might just play the game in 2D mode even if my PC supports 3D if it means the graphics will at least have a consistently high quality...
</rant>

[Ragnarok]

Ed, keep in mind that is a pretty large shot of the ship. I imagine once it is scaled down to the size it will be in the game that it will improve in quality some. But I can still see where you are coming from...

[Ed Kolis]

You're right... just now I scaled the Jraenar ship down to 25% resolution and the only flaw I could see was the polygonization of the saucer section; the texturing was even more detailed than SE4's Jraenar Battleship!
Though now that I look at the SE4 pic a bit more closely, the SE5 Version is missing a few of those little details, like the "snake eyes" I never noticed before, and the circular things (hangar bays? reactors?) on top of the central hull...
Still, seeing these things zip about in realtime 3D will more than make up for any loss of detail on the static models... while it seems that the components will just be static bitmaps (unless Aaron wants the original models too...) so we can't have the "spinny tech items" from GalCiv and MOO2, we could always have spiffy rotating hulls on the ship design screen if it's not too annoying... hmm, I'd find that out myself but that would mean I'd have to load up MOO3 again Ah well, make the rotating hulls a checkbox on the ship design screen, and give the player the ability to drag to view from different angles and I'll be happy

[Will]

I presume the shot is of a ship with (I think) a satellite behind it. The satellite looks really good, but the ship's polygons are painfully obvious, especially in the forward section. Hopefully the models have their details bumped up a few more notches, and render time compensated through face culling. That's probably an efficiency thing that can be added toward the end of development, though.

[Kamog]

Yeah, that polygon is pretty obvious in the saucer section, but other than that, the picture looks great!

[Atrocities]

Making components that look good is a lot harder than one might think. A lot harder.

[David E. Gervais]

Atrocities said:
Making components that look good is a lot harder than one might think. A lot harder.

Bah, humbug,.. one man's starbase is another man's methane extractor. But seriously, I often see different things when I look at pics of various ships. Some ship sections would make good cargo pod components, some engines make good generators, some hulls look like all they need is a hand grip to turn it into a troop weapon, etc..

It's all just a matter of using a little immagination. I hope we find some willing and good artists to help with the components.

Cheers!