Zoner LF

[Guest]

Well, the cockpit should be to scale, right? A person has to sit in there. That alone (assuming the model is indeed final) is enough to determine a ballpark size.

[DAnvilFan]

It's up to one's imagination to determine how big the cockpit is on the inside. It could be enough to fit only one person or four.

More than likely the balancing development team will decide on how small the ship will be. I will make a suggestion, but I'm merely a modeler/texture artist.

[DAnvilFan]

Unwrapped UVs, for those who are interested.





Here is the same UV Layout when looked through RoadKill's "stretching colorization" mode. Get RoadKill here.




Green represents good layout. Red represents UVs that are too small. Blue represents UVs that are too large. You'll notice that 99% of the UVs are green, which means that the UV layout has been optimized against stretching.

Bad UV Layouts can cause some very bad texture stretching as seen in the Zoner Destroyer model below:




Stretching is when one square area of your texture covers (for example) 2 polygons, and another square area of the same size covers 10 polygons. What you get is that this second square of the texture has to stretch itself across 8 additional polygons, achieving the stretch effect you see above.

[Tovig]

Wow just found thise. Awesome. Me want.

[Jinx]

the ship looks excellent - and i do think that it fits in as one of the "latest" zoner developements. - for a change - a ship that is not supposed to have been in service for decades already.

about the presentation.

everything is good. - but of course, we ll have to suffer some decrease in quality when such a ship is put into the game. - object shadows, innate glows etc. increase a mesh tenfold - sadly though ( or rather gladly, cause such effects are mostly useless and don t have any gameplay effect at all but slow down the performance ) - the freelancer engine doesn t support those shaders.

so - to get an idea how the ship looks ingame - one will have to think of the final image without glowing parts, without shadows and advanced shaders. - which still leaves an awesome design.



about designs - i agree with tenacity. - discovery is meant to stick to a rather conservative design. - but NOT a design that is stuck in the past.

so we are not to design giant mechas or oversized super stardestroyers with starconverters or rediculously huge weaponbatteries, nor are we to make designs that look too sophisticated, too semi organic or whatever. - but we are meant to show a progress in designs.

when a new ship is being made, it will need to look like its a new ship. even if the ships in vanilla have been in service for ... centuries sometimes. that doesn t mean new ships cannot show some new design lines.

think of designs of cars on earth. - a car from the 80s and a car from the early 2000s - its only 20 years apart - and yet, the design of the new car is vastly different to the design of the 80s car. - however, the "internals" are often quite similar, an engine, four wheels and room for passengers.

ships should be about the same. if you mention that military design is different, more functional - just compare a jet from active service in the 80s - with a modern jet. - they still fly fast and carry weapons - but a jet from today looks like something people would have considered to be a UFO in the late 60s.

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Shipdesigns made for DiscoveryGC

[DAnvilFan]

Thanks Jinx.

The lighting will certainly look a lot less impressive in game, due to the limitations of the Freelancer engine. I can however bake certain shadows and glow effects into the textures. I can even bake reflections, although I'll have to test them out to see how they look when they are static.

In regards to the glow effects, I found an interesting thing while looking through old Ship Submissions:
Phantom Dreadnpught

If anybody knows how to duplicate the effect of the glowing border outlining that ship then I will be good to go. It seems to me like it's a regular color map, but I am not certain.

[frozen]

Its just a texture used in nomad structures. the reason it seems all glowy etc is because the rest of the ship is pure black and you cant make out any details on it.

ive forgotten the name of the texture, but you'd prolly find it in the SOLAR folder (just check the nomad mat files, you'd find it there)

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