SE:V Shipset Questions

[ToddT]

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

[Phoenix-D]

Buh-what?

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

[Suicide Junkie]

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.

[Noble713]

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

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.

[Phoenix-D]

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.

[Noble713]

*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.

[Kana]

Noble713 said:
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.

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?

[Q]

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

[Mephisto]

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

[Captain Kwok]

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.