The Terrans

[AgentZero]

Renegade: Terrans are ruthless, expansionistic, aggressive and occasionally genocidal. Of course they look evil.

ZeroAdunn: How long it takes me to get the shipset done is a matter of how long it takes me to get over my artist's block on the Battleship and Dreadnought. Any suggestions are welcome at this point coz I really don't know where I should go with them. I'm not too sure where I'm going with the bases either, but everything else I've got a vague idea of what I want to do.

The Deadly Shoe: You've obviously never seen me draw by hand. I've got a couple Terran ship sketches on the fridge and people keep saying what a good artist my 2 year old niece is.

And Kerensky: Thanks! I intend to.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Oh and AZ... try to lobby to have YOUR shipset to be implemented as the stock Terran shipset in SEV.

Should certainly be possible.

And if not, well then, continue anyway. I've heard someone say that it is likely that higher-poly ships can also be used in SEV at the cost of FPS. Other games have that too.

[Kamog]

I can just imagine that Terran saying, "Heh heh heh heh... Trust me."

[ZeroAdunn]

Suggestions:

Battleship: Building on the battlecruiser design, extend the top and bottom panelling back so it covers the engines, cut out the edges where the side panels are, making the top and bottom armor panels a t shape. Then cut out a section in the middle and add some sort of weapons collection coming out of it.

Dreadnought: I would just make it a massive block. Where there is the top and bottom armor panels, with sections cut out of it, and weapon groups connected to the center components via struts. Fill out the front with various weapons ports and do the same with the sides.

[NullAshton]

Those panels could be used as shield panels, to project the shield bubble...

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Or to serve as partial shield replacements... i.e. no shield generated in those areas, but the hull is polarized/energised/etc. to the same stopping power as the shield, cutting power requirements for the shield.

[AgentZero]

Bit of both, actually, Strategia. On the second page of this thread, a couple posts up from the Cruiser pic there's a description of what the plates are made of.

ZeroAdunn, as is often the case with me, you've given me an idea for the battleship and dreadnought that probably will look nothing like what you had in mind. But thanks anyway!

As for this series appearing in SEV, I wouldn't count on it. For one thing, if it did, me posting it here would be a violation of the NDA, albeit retroactively. Second of all, when it was said that SE5 would handle higher-poly ships at a reduced frame rate, I think we were talking about somewhere in the 2000-3000 range as opposed to the recomended 1000-1500. As it stands, the Dreadnought is probably going to hit 200,000 easily. Which means that 5 DNs would take up the same ammount of poly-crunching power as an 500-ships per side battle using the recomended number of polys. If that same battle were to be played out entirely with DNs, you'd be talking about 200,000,000 polys! I think most computers would have a bit of a problem with that.

And third, Bryce can't export to .X! Auugh! One of these days I'm going to sit down and learn myself a modeller that can, then maybe you'll see these guys in SE5. Any suggestions for a good (ie: easy & cheap/free) modeller that can export to .X?

[Phoenix-D]

Wings3d doesn't export to .x natively I think, but using Lithunrap (also free) its pretty easy to get the models it makes into .x.

Bryce, unfortunately, doesn't export to -anything-.

[Ed Kolis]

Art of Illusion is an excellent modeller (you should check out its procedural shaders! ) and it exports to .obj, which can be converted to .x fairly easily.
Note that there's even a script available which converts procedural displacement maps to real geometry, so for instance if you take a simple sphere and apply a "noise" displacement map to it you'd get an asteroid...

[narf poit chez BOOM]

I like those ships.