2nd attempt; space armarda

[Bob McDob]

Originally posted by Vadus
@Bob McDob:

The map looks cool, especially the starlanes
but remember, that the AI can't work fine with one tiled pieces of Land. The AI woun't colonize other plantes

Would it be possible to have the planets as, say, empty, undefended cities (and make it impossible to raze them)? (his would also make it possible to "name" planets, per se.

Also, I remember a mod a while back that enabled placing cities on water. That might work for placing "city islands" - I'm trying to find a way that would make marines the only unit for taking planets (ships would be able to bombard, but not conquer).

Bob McDob I realy like your ship designs, especialy the dreadnought in the lower right. Have you tryed making any animations your self? Unit animations for a space mod are prety easy, you don't realy need to work about shadows, and the animations are a peice of cake, just a flash of light for the guns and slow dismemberment or change of graphics for the death animation.
[/B]

The two bigger ones aren't mine, though: all of them are based on ships from the movie Wing Commander (although the two small ones are mostly my design, since they were seen onscreen only briefly, and then not in great detail). I have another ship to replace it, though. I haven't done any animations, but I suppose I could try.

 

[Bluemofia]

well, i dont think it is possible to make a planet a undefended city that can't be razed.

 

[Bob McDob]

1:

 

[Bob McDob]

2:

 

[Bob McDob]

3:

 

[Bob McDob]

4:

 

[Bob McDob]

5:

 

[Bob McDob]

I made these over the course of serveral monthes. I'm not terribly good at it, but I hope that maybe this could be masked somewhat by the low resolutions required for CivIII anis.

1 is the heavy capship, the supercruiser from the WCM. It has a small fighter bay, not shown.

2 is a generic destroyer escort. I personally like this ship the best,

3 is an even smaller corvette picket, influenced slightly by Honor Harrington designs.

4 is ... well, I'm not sure what 4 is, exactly, but it has a lot of guns. I based it on old WWI dreadnoughts and Cold War submarines, and the President's ship from the Battlestar Galactica miniseries.

5 is what I made when I wasn't satisfied with any of the other four ships. It also carries the most weapons and has the highest poly count.

All four of them look better untextured than with my pitiful attempts, trust me :\ smokingmirror, you seem to be good at texturing, would you like to give it a try?


Anyway, I wouldn't recommend having this many ships for each side, unless you can give a specific role to them (bombard ship, marine transport, scout, etc). On the marine transport: it could possibly be the only ship capable of taking planets, eliminating the need to load and unload ground units for planetary assaults., I'm not sure how to make other ships incapable - perhaps make them air units and set to mobile?

Regarding the spacelanes in my map: they're designed as railroad-like jump lines to and from star systems. The real battles, therefore, are decided at choke points, where an entrenched garrision can possibly repel an entire battle fleet. This also makes a strategic element necessary, as you don't want to take control of a warpnode-laden system only to have to defend it from four or five directions. (Fans of Space Empires and/or Conquest: Frontier Wars will understand).

 

[Smoking mirror]

Yeah, Ive played a demo of Conquest: Frontier Wars and it was one of the best RTS games I've played in a long time. I've been trying to get the full game for a while but can never find it in a shop.

Up un til recently I sucked at doing textures too, My program is not very well designed for creating single shapes with a complex texture, usualy I have to used dozens of shapes each with its own texture, and this makes render time apalling.

I'm thinking that the inner system ships of the third age should be single battleships, destroyers, crusisers and the like, realy hulking industrial behemoths. Your designs would go well for this era (I'm thinking of pushing the higgs ship idea up to the fourth era as its quite an advanced tech).

from experience I think ships 2,3 & 4 would translate best to civ III scale, the others would either be much too long (overlapping the edge of the square) or look too small, and loose all thier detail.

The next few posts show my ideas on how to texturise your units.
The best place to start is with this texture, which you will have to convert to whatever texture map format your program uses;

 

[Smoking mirror]

As you can see its a grid of co-ordinates in an easy to spot large size font. each letter or number is only used once so you can tell that you're looking at the right point on the model.

So aply that texture to your model without a tile effect and you should get something like this;

 

[Smoking mirror]

next turn the model around a bit to gauge where all the coordinates lie. when editing your texture its important to have your 3d program open int he background so you can use it for reference.

look at every angle and try to get a feel of where the letters apear in relation to the important points on your model, such as engines and cockpit.

 

[Smoking mirror]

Most likely your design is symetrical so it shouldnt be too difficult to plot one side an then cut and paste a mirror on to the other side of the texture. Use a grid to keep the areas regular, and as your design is quite regular (hopefully) it should match up with only minor fiddling (it can take as long to get a texture right as it does to make the original model).

this is what I had for the above shuttle model;

 

[Smoking mirror]

Dont worry how crude it is at this stage, because next you use texture fills (on your 2d paint program) to improve the quallity of the texture. But for now this is how the texture sits on the model. Its important to go through this stage if your 3d program uses multi layed textures, as it allows you to add different qualities to areas of the texture using masks created from the basic shapes.

 

[Smoking mirror]

Finaly depending on the nature of your 3d program you can add further effects such as glow and transparency or shine to your textures. Details of how to do this part should be in the help file for your program.

This is how my eventual shuttle model looked with full texturing;

 

[Smoking mirror]

This will be one of the last previews, This is "almost" all the land units for the first & second eras. I will go back and add more later, but for a start I want a bare minimum number of units just to get the mod moving on.

The last one to make is a second era defensive unit, such as an ironclad, or monitor.

I'm also planing on resturcturing the ship list, with one new addition or replacement. I need to make a giant ship carrier for the second age, I'm thinking a huge flying wing, with fusion rocket power. All chrome and chevrons. It will be slow and weak, but capable of carrying some of the later larger land units.

below, from left to right are;
1st row;
defence satelite
destroyer
freighter
2nd row;;
light cruiser
gunboat
deltawing shuttle
constructor
3rd row;;
light corvette
and dropship.
The dropship will hopefully turn and disgorge small troops as an attack, depends on how small though. Latter troop carriers wil include a giant armoured assault sphere with hollow octopus arms that it uses to "inject" assault troops in to enemy ships.

 

[A Viking Yeti]

First off, we don't have any idea what the effects of a bare singularity would do. For all we know cows could fly out, . It might be a feasable mode of transportation, we really have no idea. All laws of physics break down, since it's not really the pressence of mater; more so the absence of space-time fabric. It could have a completely new set of physics all together.

Secondly, assuming the invariant VSL theory is right, "faster that the speed of light travel" is theoretically possible. Though, you wouldn't actually be moving faster that the speed of light, the speed of light would just be higher in that region or energy level. Also, theorectical cosmic strings with increadably high energy density and extremely high tension, could (according to invariant VSL theories) make the speed of light very high in the immediate region; and thusly make tachyonic travel possible. SM, as I just figured out, wasn't talking about moving tardonic mater faster than the speed of light; he was saying changing the state of the mater, so that it was massless.

Thirdly, anti-matter production isn't the problem. It's containing it. You need to contain it at near absolute-0 temperatures and in a powerful magnetic field. This would require a nuclear power plant in the missile, detachable and recoverabe if you're smart , and a large containment center.

Considering the scale, which I had not realized before, ground units would be kinda odd. I dout that random maps will work, due to the larger amounts of land.

BTW: Regardless of theorectical physics issues, all the ships look great so far. Can't wait to see all this work collaberate, should make a great mod .

 

[Smoking mirror]

I'm still undecided about wormholes and the like. Einstien seemed to think that a wormhole was a possible naturaly occuring phenomenom, and as such it should be possible to produce one artificaly using the right technology. (A few decades ago people would have thought that the idea of artifical diamonds was impossible, but now we have some idea of how to do it, but not he technology. I think thats prety much how things happen, one day every one thinks its impossible, then some one comes up with a therory to make it possible, then finaly we acheive the technology required to make it happen).

I think that a possible aproach would be to use nano-technology to create litteraly billions of microscopic engines for effecting the more exotic particles and states that govern the nature of matter. Once a way of adjusting the gravitational effects of the quantum vacum had been found, an area of localised, artifical (I.e. not linked to a material object) gravity could be tweaked to a very high level, and caused to rotate. This could be acheived by a "Soup" of nano machines, mixed with a second "soup" designed to make the machines themselves resistant if not imune to the effects of gravity. Once the machines had finished or had been destroyed, they could stop thier manipulations of the quantum vacum and the artificial sigularity (being a product of a localised tweaking of the quantum vacum, rather than a material object) could be "turned off".

Obviously, the size of the ossilations of a ring singularity in an artifical black hole would be proportional to the size of the black hole itself, so it would be a matter of creating enough nano"soup" to cover a large area, and supplying it with enough energy to "open the wormhole". So size would be a major consideration (in regards to its gravitational effect on nearby planetary or stella bodies). Even if the wormhole were open for only a fraction of a second it would have a massive gravitational effect on nearby space. Its certainly not something you would want to do near the earth or the sun. Though if a "gravity shield" could be effected between the blackhole and the star system....

Its all still just fantasy, and a core point is that yes, you would have to travel to the final destination in a coventional way first, and the same high energy, high tech performance would have to be carried out at both ends at exactly the same time, and exactly the same manner, but Wormholes are one of the most aluring "semi plausable" ideas in science fiction.
Purely from a game mechanics point of view they allow things such as airports, aircraft and ICBMs to be used. So I'm not 100% keen to rule them out at this point, obviously some of the science in the mod is going to be fantastical, but its more a matter of controling my imaginative impulses rather than editing them out all together. Afterall, anything can happen in the 4th era....

 

[Celeborn]

I've been messing around with my terrian ideas and seem to have come up with a system that works with 3 types of planets, Earth-like/ocean(hills) rocky(LM Hills) and Gas (Marsh)... I'll work on it some more and get back to you...

 

[A Viking Yeti]

Wait, I thought wormholes (a collection of quantum particles, right?) were created by a field of negative energy. Is this correct, or am I mistaken? You could split a powerful beam of light, every trillonth of a second, into a prism to generate a negative energy enviornment. It would take a lot of energy and a little charging up, but so what. It's better than waiting several thousand years in cryogenic stasis, .

Also, if gravity depends on the ratio of masses between both objects, then extremely small nano-machines would feel no effects; just as unicellular organisms don't feel the Earth's gravity. Or you could simply supercool several water molecuals within the nano-machines, spin them (them refering to the nano-machines) at high speeds to create an anit-gravitational force. Then any abrupt change in speed would send the water molecuals blasting out of the nano-machine, effectivly destroying the nano-machine and the wormhole with it. Only question is, are we sure that the centurfugal force is enough to maintain stable super cooling? Who cares, this is thousands of years in the future!!!

 

[subbss]

Wonderful job on this mod , can't wait for it to be finished, I will be following its progress closely and will help if I can .

For inspiration you could try the game Galactic Core, which is very similar to what you are trying to make with equally creative technology/unit ideas . Unfortunately the free demo only alows you to play as human so you will have to play the entire 3-4 mission terran campaign that comes free with the demo to see more of the enemy ships, but I think it is worth it as it will give you great ideas! Of course, if you decide you really like the game (I did) you could buy the full version....

Here is the link:
http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/GalacticCore/index.html