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Sorry for not responding sooner; I went on a hike on Saturday and
got a huge sunburnhad a total blast, but it did keep me off the forum all day. 🙂For the textures, I’ve been thinking about them and finally came to a decision. A major selling point of I-War 2 was the advanced texture features of DirectX 7. They had the ability to use realistic looking rust, plus a wear and tear effect. It was baked into the textures beforehand, obviously, and nobody thinks about it anymore because it’s in every game on the planet now, but at the time, most games couldn’t render such things in a realistic manner.
I want to keep to the original appeal of the game. The way autorepair works is that a bunch of nanobots rebuild the hull on a molecular level. This is gonna make every ship’s hull have a slightly different pattern. Procedurally generating the main textures will enable every ship to have a unique look, and you can vary the amount of age shown depending on how old the ship is. Obviously some texturing will need to be done by hand, but I want that to be as little as possible.
I don’t know where the idea of saving PCG textures to the hard drive came from; it defeats the entire purpose. When I refer to load times, I’m talking about the time required to pull data from a spinning hard drive. Even SSDs, fast as they are, will never trump the speed of generating the textures on the fly. It’s a little silly of me to worry about speed, TBH, since even 2k textures on every model will load from a hard drive in a couple seconds, but I want PCG textures for that uniqueness it’ll give every ship in game.
Best part is you can slowly increase the age of the player ship as the campaign rolls along, so by the end of Act 2 you’ll notice your Tug is a lot more beat-up looking than it was when you got it. 👿
–IronDuke
I-War 2 Discord: https://discord.gg/RWaabWB
Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. 🙂Sorry for not responding sooner; I went on a hike on Saturday and
got a huge sunburnhad a total blast, but it did keep me off the forum all day. 🙂For the textures, I’ve been thinking about them and finally came to a decision. A major selling point of I-War 2 was the advanced texture features of DirectX 7. They had the ability to use realistic looking rust, plus a wear and tear effect. It was baked into the textures beforehand, obviously, and nobody thinks about it anymore because it’s in every game on the planet now, but at the time, most games couldn’t render such things in a realistic manner.
I want to keep to the original appeal of the game. The way autorepair works is that a bunch of nanobots rebuild the hull on a molecular level. This is gonna make every ship’s hull have a slightly different pattern. Procedurally generating the main textures will enable every ship to have a unique look, and you can vary the amount of age shown depending on how old the ship is. Obviously some texturing will need to be done by hand, but I want that to be as little as possible.
I don’t know where the idea of saving PCG textures to the hard drive came from; it defeats the entire purpose. When I refer to load times, I’m talking about the time required to pull data from a spinning hard drive. Even SSDs, fast as they are, will never trump the speed of generating the textures on the fly. It’s a little silly of me to worry about speed, TBH, since even 2k textures on every model will load from a hard drive in a couple seconds, but I want PCG textures for that uniqueness it’ll give every ship in game.
Best part is you can slowly increase the age of the player ship as the campaign rolls along, so by the end of Act 2 you’ll notice your Tug is a lot more beat-up looking than it was when you got it. 👿
–IronDuke
I-War 2 Discord: https://discord.gg/RWaabWB
Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. 🙂Right, I’ll try out Irfanview. Previously I’d used a really old version of Paint Shop Pro, since Gimp can’t seem to open .RAW files. Thanks Chessking! 🙂
As for texturing the models, to keep file sizes and load times down, I’d like to use procedural textures wherever possible. No idea how, but Unity’s documentation was talking about them, so I’m sure it’s not hard. Obviously lots of stuff can’t be textured procedurally, so the old-fashioned method will be needed as well.
–IronDuke
P.S. This thread really exploded. :blink:
P.P.S Bozobub, thank you for the giant laugh. 😆
I-War 2 Discord: https://discord.gg/RWaabWB
Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. 🙂Right, I’ll try out Irfanview. Previously I’d used a really old version of Paint Shop Pro, since Gimp can’t seem to open .RAW files. Thanks Chessking! 🙂
As for texturing the models, to keep file sizes and load times down, I’d like to use procedural textures wherever possible. No idea how, but Unity’s documentation was talking about them, so I’m sure it’s not hard. Obviously lots of stuff can’t be textured procedurally, so the old-fashioned method will be needed as well.
–IronDuke
P.S. This thread really exploded. :blink:
P.P.S Bozobub, thank you for the giant laugh. 😆
I-War 2 Discord: https://discord.gg/RWaabWB
Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. 🙂Can you please tell me exactly how you are converting from .ftu to .png? That would be massively helpful for me to be able to do as well.
–IronDuke
I-War 2 Discord: https://discord.gg/RWaabWB
Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. 🙂Can you please tell me exactly how you are converting from .ftu to .png? That would be massively helpful for me to be able to do as well.
–IronDuke
I-War 2 Discord: https://discord.gg/RWaabWB
Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. 🙂@ Bozobub & Schmatzler
Thanks guys! Glad you like it so far. I’m pretty excited about how much stuff I can get working in Unity in a silly short amount of time. I took a couple months or so off from serious work, but I’ve finally managed to straighten out enough, and this Gunstar, which didn’t exist on Sunday, along with the Light PBC, were both created yesterday. B)
Look at the first picture. There’s two windows on the right, the hierarchy and the inspector. If you look at the hierarchy, you can see nested under “Comsec” a large number of objects named Roll, Pitch, Yaw, Y, X, and Z. Those are all individual thrusters. They’re all fully functional in terms of thrust – the ship flies by applying thrust at each thruster location. No fancy graphics on them yet at all, but that’s simply a matter of making them, which I’ll likely do when I add AI piloting.
The visual for LDA hits in I-War 2 is a simple flare pointing at the camera that grows and then fades, plus a little shockwave-ring-thingy aligned to the normal of the impact point. I should know. I completely replaced it at one point as an experiment. I could point you straight to the .lws file too; there’s a second one as well that’s the same but without the shockwave, for use at longer ranges because you’d never see the shockwave so they figured on saving some rendering power.
Using the original images I’m not sure about; I don’t have a program that can convert the ingame textures to something I can edit. I used to on my old Pentium 4, but that computer’s long gone. I’m likely gonna need to just create a new effect from scratch. That’s fine by me; if there’s one thing I have never ever gotten tired of, it’s making special effects. I’ve burned out of literally everything else at some point or other, but not special effects. 👿
In terms of the work for getting 3-D models into the game, I just run the .pso through a reverse-engineered lwo-to-pso converter that
Particle SystemsStephen Robertson supplied the modding community way back and some smart bloke managed to reverse it. This produces a .lwo, which I import into Blender. I fix any holes in the geometry, add seams to the automatic smoothing, then save it as a .blend in the Unity project folder. Unity can natively read .blend files, which is awesome.The only real downside is that the reverse-converter only gives me the 3-D model. No original smoothing data, which means I have to use screenshots frrom the vanilla game to know where to place seams. No UVs, which means applying the original textures is darn near impossible. Doesn’t matter; not one of them is over 256×256, and I’d prefer to use 2k textures. B) We’ll have to make new ones. It’s a bummer I’m such a lousy artist at drawing stuff; maybe one of you guys is better than me at that.
–IronDuke
I-War 2 Discord: https://discord.gg/RWaabWB
Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. 🙂@ Bozobub & Schmatzler
Thanks guys! Glad you like it so far. I’m pretty excited about how much stuff I can get working in Unity in a silly short amount of time. I took a couple months or so off from serious work, but I’ve finally managed to straighten out enough, and this Gunstar, which didn’t exist on Sunday, along with the Light PBC, were both created yesterday. B)
Look at the first picture. There’s two windows on the right, the hierarchy and the inspector. If you look at the hierarchy, you can see nested under “Comsec” a large number of objects named Roll, Pitch, Yaw, Y, X, and Z. Those are all individual thrusters. They’re all fully functional in terms of thrust – the ship flies by applying thrust at each thruster location. No fancy graphics on them yet at all, but that’s simply a matter of making them, which I’ll likely do when I add AI piloting.
The visual for LDA hits in I-War 2 is a simple flare pointing at the camera that grows and then fades, plus a little shockwave-ring-thingy aligned to the normal of the impact point. I should know. I completely replaced it at one point as an experiment. I could point you straight to the .lws file too; there’s a second one as well that’s the same but without the shockwave, for use at longer ranges because you’d never see the shockwave so they figured on saving some rendering power.
Using the original images I’m not sure about; I don’t have a program that can convert the ingame textures to something I can edit. I used to on my old Pentium 4, but that computer’s long gone. I’m likely gonna need to just create a new effect from scratch. That’s fine by me; if there’s one thing I have never ever gotten tired of, it’s making special effects. I’ve burned out of literally everything else at some point or other, but not special effects. 👿
In terms of the work for getting 3-D models into the game, I just run the .pso through a reverse-engineered lwo-to-pso converter that
Particle SystemsStephen Robertson supplied the modding community way back and some smart bloke managed to reverse it. This produces a .lwo, which I import into Blender. I fix any holes in the geometry, add seams to the automatic smoothing, then save it as a .blend in the Unity project folder. Unity can natively read .blend files, which is awesome.The only real downside is that the reverse-converter only gives me the 3-D model. No original smoothing data, which means I have to use screenshots frrom the vanilla game to know where to place seams. No UVs, which means applying the original textures is darn near impossible. Doesn’t matter; not one of them is over 256×256, and I’d prefer to use 2k textures. B) We’ll have to make new ones. It’s a bummer I’m such a lousy artist at drawing stuff; maybe one of you guys is better than me at that.
–IronDuke
I-War 2 Discord: https://discord.gg/RWaabWB
Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. 🙂Looky what I did!
So I put these on:
They seem pretty functional…
However, you can bite back!
After I’ve made the thing able to lead the player’s vector and added actual damage scripts (:blush:), plus finalized the Comsec’s flight model balancing, I promise to record a short video of myself flying the Comsec against the Gunstar.
The only weapon in game ATM is the Light PBC. It travels at the correct speed of 4,500 m/s, makes the correct sound both upon firing and hitting, but doesn’t use the original image file because I can’t seem to find where I stuck my pile of converted SFX textures for the game. Any other weapon can be added simply by changing the stats and effects. B)
The turrets on the Gunstar are fully simulated by physics – a motor turns them, and they have real colliders, unlike the vanilla game’s turrets. If I were to press against a turret with enough force, I could likely turn it somewhat. The good news is that the gimballed weapons ingame can be done simply by using turrets with 45 degree horizontal and vertical tracking. :whistle: Not done yet though. I did stick weapon jitter in already. 😉
I’ll also work on sticking in a missile script I wrote for another project. It can predict target velocity and everything, and assuming you give it a strong enough thruster, is actually pretty hard to dodge. Beam weapons are imminent as well; that is another simple copy-paste.
No textures, obviously. Those aren’t coming until I’ve remodeled the 3-D models. I’m just copy-pasting the originals to get the game mechanics in place solid.
The PBC bolts use a special raycast collision detector that I coded. Your shots absolutely positively cannot ever pass through a target and fail to detect it, assuming I did this right. :cheer: I also have an extremely evil plan for using particle systems to make rapid-fire infantry-type weapons. Might not come to anything, or might only be used for point-defense cannons, but I’ve been wanting to make one of these systems for a while now.
No shields implemented at the moment; that shall also change soon. I-War 2’s main focus is combat; hence, I’m implementing all the combat mechanics first to make sure they’re solid before I do anything else. Plus, this means a Unity-made Instant Action will reach you guys sooner. 👿
I also can’t wait to see what sort of eye candy I can pull off for things like LDS and capsule space. B)
–IronDuke
I-War 2 Discord: https://discord.gg/RWaabWB
Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. 🙂Looky what I did!
So I put these on:
They seem pretty functional…
However, you can bite back!
After I’ve made the thing able to lead the player’s vector and added actual damage scripts (:blush:), plus finalized the Comsec’s flight model balancing, I promise to record a short video of myself flying the Comsec against the Gunstar.
The only weapon in game ATM is the Light PBC. It travels at the correct speed of 4,500 m/s, makes the correct sound both upon firing and hitting, but doesn’t use the original image file because I can’t seem to find where I stuck my pile of converted SFX textures for the game. Any other weapon can be added simply by changing the stats and effects. B)
The turrets on the Gunstar are fully simulated by physics – a motor turns them, and they have real colliders, unlike the vanilla game’s turrets. If I were to press against a turret with enough force, I could likely turn it somewhat. The good news is that the gimballed weapons ingame can be done simply by using turrets with 45 degree horizontal and vertical tracking. :whistle: Not done yet though. I did stick weapon jitter in already. 😉
I’ll also work on sticking in a missile script I wrote for another project. It can predict target velocity and everything, and assuming you give it a strong enough thruster, is actually pretty hard to dodge. Beam weapons are imminent as well; that is another simple copy-paste.
No textures, obviously. Those aren’t coming until I’ve remodeled the 3-D models. I’m just copy-pasting the originals to get the game mechanics in place solid.
The PBC bolts use a special raycast collision detector that I coded. Your shots absolutely positively cannot ever pass through a target and fail to detect it, assuming I did this right. :cheer: I also have an extremely evil plan for using particle systems to make rapid-fire infantry-type weapons. Might not come to anything, or might only be used for point-defense cannons, but I’ve been wanting to make one of these systems for a while now.
No shields implemented at the moment; that shall also change soon. I-War 2’s main focus is combat; hence, I’m implementing all the combat mechanics first to make sure they’re solid before I do anything else. Plus, this means a Unity-made Instant Action will reach you guys sooner. 👿
I also can’t wait to see what sort of eye candy I can pull off for things like LDS and capsule space. B)
–IronDuke
I-War 2 Discord: https://discord.gg/RWaabWB
Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. 🙂Yes, I know it’s possible with players. :V Obviously, since all the player ships have proper groups of same-weapon-types. NPCs don’t get to have those, and it’s reflected when you REM-link to them. Each weapon gets its own individual group.
When I say player vs NPC, I’m referring to the pilot installed. In the code, there’s a pog class called Pilot or something of that sort, I don’t remember exactly. But for a ship to move, it must be controlled by a Pilot. Being controlled by a Pilot tagged as Player means that the player’s input controls the ship. Being controlled by a Pilot tagged as AI means, surprise surprise, an AI controls it. When you REM-link, the AI Pilot is removed and a Player Pilot installed, and vice-versa when you kill the link. As far as I can tell, any ship initially set up with an AI pilot has all the weapons in their own groups, while any set up initially with a Player Pilot has same-type weapons in the same group. I suppose it was easier to code that way or something, I dunno.Anyway, yeah, I’ll poke around my massive mod collection and see whether I can find one that changes the thruster animations.
–IronDuke
I-War 2 Discord: https://discord.gg/RWaabWB
Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. 🙂Yes, I know it’s possible with players. :V Obviously, since all the player ships have proper groups of same-weapon-types. NPCs don’t get to have those, and it’s reflected when you REM-link to them. Each weapon gets its own individual group.
When I say player vs NPC, I’m referring to the pilot installed. In the code, there’s a pog class called Pilot or something of that sort, I don’t remember exactly. But for a ship to move, it must be controlled by a Pilot. Being controlled by a Pilot tagged as Player means that the player’s input controls the ship. Being controlled by a Pilot tagged as AI means, surprise surprise, an AI controls it. When you REM-link, the AI Pilot is removed and a Player Pilot installed, and vice-versa when you kill the link. As far as I can tell, any ship initially set up with an AI pilot has all the weapons in their own groups, while any set up initially with a Player Pilot has same-type weapons in the same group. I suppose it was easier to code that way or something, I dunno.Anyway, yeah, I’ll poke around my massive mod collection and see whether I can find one that changes the thruster animations.
–IronDuke
I-War 2 Discord: https://discord.gg/RWaabWB
Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. 🙂The fire control goofs are due to the fact that NPCs can fire any combination of weapons simultaneously so they never coded linked weapons. I never found a way to fix it.
As for the thrusters, that’s just the animation, right? That’s a bug I know of but forgot about; they didn’t link the lateral thruster animations with the actual input values correctly. Some mod did fix it; might have been Unleashed Mod. I’ll have to check at some point and see.
–IronDuke
I-War 2 Discord: https://discord.gg/RWaabWB
Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. 🙂The fire control goofs are due to the fact that NPCs can fire any combination of weapons simultaneously so they never coded linked weapons. I never found a way to fix it.
As for the thrusters, that’s just the animation, right? That’s a bug I know of but forgot about; they didn’t link the lateral thruster animations with the actual input values correctly. Some mod did fix it; might have been Unleashed Mod. I’ll have to check at some point and see.
–IronDuke
I-War 2 Discord: https://discord.gg/RWaabWB
Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. 🙂Oooh, a bug to fix! :cheer:
I’ll check on it immediately. B)
Edit: Right, some questions right off the bat. Seems for beauty shots, you copy a sim that you want into the sim folder of the mod. Did you copy the ones from my patch or from the original game files?
It’s entirely possible that my patch ain’t gonna be working with beauty shots. Have you tried it in Instant Action?–IronDuke
P.S. :silly:
I-War 2 Discord: https://discord.gg/RWaabWB
Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. 🙂
