Galactic Empire Mod preview (56k BEWARE)

[Caydr]

Based on Imperium Galactica. No details yet. I expect to begin working on it full-time after both the next AA:Spring version, and next AA:OTA version, and my current mystery-mod-project is finished. And I'm caught up on my schoolwork. Expect a beta by February. The mod will be centered around small-scale combat, with generally no more than 2 or 3 ships involved in a given battle. Think Freespace 2, Starfleet Command series, etc. Heavy emphasis on tactics - ie, some unit will have a devastating broadside, while others will be best-used for head-on attacks or hit-and-run. If you expose your entire force in a single battle, it will probably lose the game for you.






2700 polygons, but a late-game ship not likely to be seen in numbers. This is a Cahudhri-class heavy cruiser, which is at the very top of the tech tree. G/E/M will have space-based maps. Game will be centered largely around destroyers and fighters. Also flagships will be featured, think of them as krogoths.

Overall tech tree will consist of:
4 fighters
2 bombers
3 destroyers
3 cruisers
4 flagships

ground combat of some kind is also a possibility.

[FizWizz]

that... is ginormous. good luck on it.

[Zoombie]

WOw.....that looks JAW dropping!

[Gnomre]

Ginormous? Well, nah, but it's a decent model anyway. I wouldn't let that within fifty yards of 3dobuilder, though.

[Zoombie]

Wow that is a huge star destroyer

[zwzsg]

Nice model. I'm not sure Spring really is adapted to such overlage overdetailed units however. But nice model.

[Caydr]

Like I said, it's not something that will be seen often. A typical model will probably not exceed 600 polygons or so, and even then I don't estimate seeing more than 30 on screen at one time.

I've worked it out... In an exceptionally large Absolute Annnihilation battle, there are likely upwards of 200 units onscreen at one time. On average, each of these has somewhere between 80 and 200 polygons (and more if it's an evolva one or a rare, like Krogoth or Orcone)

So that means that Spring can reasonably handle at least 16000 polygons on screen at one time. The Cahudhri, shown above, or a similar model, might have at most 4 on screen at one time, with a maximum of 3000 polygons each (2700 base model plus 16 turrets). Again, this is a VERY large battle. That works out to about 1200 polygons. That leaves a spare 4000 polygons for support ships, fighters, etc, while not having bad performance compared to TA-themed mods.

Then you take into account that there will be little if any terrain to be modelled. I have to imagine that terrain takes up a fair bit of Spring's rendering power as well.

[Caydr]

I just did a test. AA bulldogs (evolva models) are 143 polygons. I got 200 of them onscreen at one time and maintained 15 frames per second. (143 polys x 200 bulldogs =28600 polygons)

Now, that's 28600 polygons at 15 frames per second, but: a sizeable portion of the processing power was used for calculating LoS, and pathfinding (they were colliding with each other quite badly, jiggling all over the place. In this mod it will not be necessary to calculate so many lines-of-sight (which SJ has said is quite processor-intensive), and all the other individual functions that are performed on 200 different units, regardless of their graphical properties.

Oh, and for the record, without ANY in existence (ctrl-a, ctrl-d), my framerate skyrocketed to only 30 fps since I was playing at 1280x1024 with all options to maximum including 2048 res shadows and dynamic clouds. AND quite a lot of net traffic, as I was downloading a 200 mb game demo.

In practice, units will not be nearly as large as the one I posted pics of. I just multiplied its size to make it look exciting ^_^

Here's a pic of 20 Cahudhris onscreen at once. They're untextured, but still sexy. Framerate drops to 24 FPS from 30.




And here's 10 more, only not joined at the hip. 28 FPS.

[zwzsg]

When I said Spring may not be adapted to such overlage overdetailed units, I wasn't referring about polycount nor framerate. I was referring about:
- Unit clipping because Spring may check if the center of the unit is within los, not if any part of the unit is withing los. And if the unit is too big, by the time its center enter los its front turret may already be past your defense line.
- Similar to the view los, the weapon may be trying to aim for the center, which may be out of range, while the tip of the Cahudhri-class heavy cruiser is touching the unit trying to fire at it.
- Collision issues. The collision sphere risk being either too big and make a too large no-fly zone, or too tight and units will fly throught the model. Ground units use footprint collision, but flying units still use sphere collision.
- People usually play in top-down view, so the underside details will be very rarely seen.


But bah, as long as it looks gorgeous I don't mind a few glitches.

[Warlord Zsinj]

Very, very spiffy.

I'm surprised how well Spring is rendering those near-curved surfaces.

[Caydr]

Textured with a single texture, just to show its shape a little better in Spring. A real texture job will be done in the future, obviously.

[j5mello]

HOLY SHIT!! nice unit

[Caydr]

Oh, incedentally, the ship will be armed with the full 16 weapons allowable by spring. Probably 6 lasers and 10 heavy guns. The lasers will remind you strongly of anti-fighter ones in Freespace 2. Battles between evenly-matched capital ships will take about more than just a few seconds to be decided.

[Zoombie]

If i could only mkae the sound i made with my mouth on the keybord when i first saw that unit.

I'll try my best.

huudgugeeee! or something like that.

The one texture is very shiny but too much of a good thing is an awsome thing. and too much of an awsome thing is a bad thing. But then again its pretty clear that new textures are comming soon?

Make it look very battered. Battered ships are more dedly. They survived there previous fights.

[Caydr]

The texture job will be strictly canon. And yeah, I know too much shiny is a bad thing... it's just one texture duplicated across the entire surface to make sure there aren't any massive model errors during the conversion process.

[zwzsg]

Make it look very battered. Battered ships are more deadly. They survived their previous fights.

What would truely own would be to have the ship becomes more and more battered depending on "get VETERANCY", or "get HEALTH", like the TLL supermech does.

[Zoombie]

That would be very very very cool

[AF]

You need a decent nebula HW2 style space map to show it off...

With a mod like this you need innovate and do wierd and wacky things, we need a breath of fresh air, adn a space mdo that breaks the mould would do us wodners at showing off spring

[Caydr]

That's the idea :)

My plan is to release a full package including the latest version of Spring as a standalone game with a couple of specially-designed levels, hopefully showing a lot of people what the engine's capable of. Maybe attract some developers?

[AF]

Well if you need ideas, or just want feedback, I dont mind, and maybe I can tear myself away from NTAI oneday and try and make some wowfactor space maps.