Ship Variants

[Baobobafet]

When I first started editing the Wave texture, my intention all along was simply to create a variant texture for the wave fighter. I thought since the original wave was optimally designed as a Hypersonic performance aircraft (judging from the lack of obvious flaps on the wings and tail).

The variant wave is actually a trade-off performance wise to the original (at least in appearance), in that it is better designed to perform at lower speeds in denser atmospheres because of the obvious flaps etc.

I was hoping there would be a way to alter the ship specs to better reflect this enhanced performance in atmospheric flight. Other things could also be changed to make it a different ship from the original in specs (but I leave these delicate choices to the more informed in this area).

In doing so, the original black version of the wave can be restored and the game would simply have added a variant of the wave fighter.

I had a similar intention in mind for my IP shuttle texture as well - thinking perhaps it would be a variant of the original IP shuttle.

I think there is opportunity to do similar with other ships in the game, where some obvious variant has a custom paint job that might dramatically change the character and look of a given ship.

In such instances, it might be an opportunity to introduce more choices to ship buyers.

Anyone have thoughts on this?

[Luomu]

Well, I made the decision of replacing the black texture since it just doesn't work well for the game - it's hard to see when put against the black background of space.

It is easy to do ship variants, just add additional ship definition in the data/ships/wave.lua file. See data/ships/4_eagles.lua for example. But short of making a duplicate model it is not possible to control the visuals from the ship definition file currently. But if you come up with good (=somewhat balanced) stats for an alternate Wave, just paste them here, it is a good start.

[Baobobafet]

Ah okay, no worries :)

Roger that, about the 4_eagle lua (I thought it just did multiple ship textures and not multiple ship specs as well) nice.

I know what you mean about the original wave being quite dark - I could try changing the original texture to something lighter if anyone thinks it's worthwhile.

Also wondering, can I presently restrain the color attribute to certain areas of the present Wave? ie: especially the white areas. Could I perhaps make a separate layer of only the white areas on a transparency to restrict color attributes to only that layer (as opposed to the whole ship)?

[Luomu]

Also wondering, can I presently restrain the color attribute to certain areas of the present Wave? ie: especially the white areas. Could I perhaps make a separate layer of only the white areas on a transparency to restrict color attributes to only that layer (as opposed to the whole ship)?

In the future this will be easy. See screenshot in #813. But right now you would have to actually change the model and split the mesh into different areas, then import them as separate .objs in the model .lua and apply a different material argument for each.

[gernot66]

#813, must have missed that ;) cool

while i'm not sure about if i really need a specular / bump mapping, glowmaps have even drawbacks, like limited amount of glowing and looking sometimes "artificial" or simply said wrong, i really don't like it much. for certain things it's better for other worse.

anyway i like that, what are we waiting for? it would need a lot of time for me to update all my models... :)

[Luomu]

We have the color customization thingy now.