i got carried away, so i'm moving the conclusion of this post to the front:
anyway, i still vote to include the "hard-point only hulls" aspect of Kyro's mod. heck, maybe just write them in as a 4th hull option, rather than eliminating or making as-jewelry the hull comps you all ready have. anyone designing super-elaborate ships is probably all ready running into polygon count issues, so i don't see it having a hugely negative affect on the group of players just designing basic ships with funtional components.
| Hate to say it, but the main hulls are just too high of a poly count for us to officially include it. Right now, jewelry peices are between 100-200 polys. Ship hulls are 700-1500 polys. Frame-rate is already pretty painfull when too many decked-out ships are on the screen, and this will just cause players to grow VERY angry with us for supporting something that we knew would bring the system to it's knees |
i hate to say this, but you missed half of Kyro's point.
| This is a petition to have one or both of the features of KHSM (blank single-hardpoint hulls, all existing hulls as jewelry) |
okay, so base hulls as jewelry is too GPU-intensive. but wouldn't blank hulls be just the opposite? i mean, sure, you can't control how many pieces of jewelry we might put on a blank hull, , but since about 7 pieces of jewelry equals 1 base hull, i seems like your statement is a little self-contradictory. if nothing else, i don't think the problem is as severe as you think. anyone who would take the time to build an entire ship from jewelry is all ready using more comps that you probably ever thought possible. maybe allowing base hulls as jewelry is a bad idea. but allowing single-hardpoint only base hulls into metaverse games, if nothing else, shouldn't make things any worse.
but maybe not. it's probably based so much on the specific user, that it'd be hard to tell. i mean, you have the disclaimer that updates require an internet connection. why not add a disclaimer that excessively large ship designs could cause system instability?
i made two suggestions for improving performance vz. ship design, here:
Link (hope that works).
okay, so maybe it's a little too much to have the game re-write the wire frames and texture maps every time a ship design is saved. and it probably would't produce a significant reduction in number of polys. but i also suggested having the game programming remove superfluous ship components.
take my Hyperion class (the pictures below are a different ship class) as an example (I was running with the theme all ready worked into the game). besides the base hull, there are 10 functional components, 7 major pieces of jewelry, and 8 smaller pieces (blue lights). however, to get the major pieces of jewelry into place, i had to use an additional 9 pieces of jewelry that are completely invisible when you actually look at the ship (i heard another player call this aspect of ship design "internal work). in other words, 10 out of 36 components were not "needed" (at least visually). the thing is, the Hyperion was one of my more
modest designs, in terms of jewelry.
i'm pretty sure these are still rendered because on the rare occasions i've seen my ships explode (heh), i'm pretty sure i can make out these little pieces exploding separately. it's honestly pretty hard to tell. the first change i suggested was a way for the player to remove superfluous pieces before finalizing a ship design and fix the other pieces in their current places.
this would reduce the number of polys in the game, assuming there's no mechanism that all ready achieves this effect itself. also, it'd allow players to design non-contiguous ships with multiple visual pieces, like the Highliners from Dune (the 2000 SciFi channel release).
of course, i'm making this suggestion with no sense of how difficult it would be to program.
Kyro, you modded the ship designs to make base hulls consisting of only 1 hard point, right? how difficult would it be to mod a couple of the jewelry comps so that they had a few hard points but no framing or texture? maybe i'll have to figure that one out myself.
in other words, the artists among us could really use a zero-poly hard point extender.. it'd be nice to add that option to the functional components as well: add the component without actually adding the art. check out this ship design for a reason why:
over 125 components. can you see what i mean about having no-art hull point extenders? but what about no-art weapons? do you see any weapons? no? don't look closer, look farther: they're huge. here's a closer look.
they're inside those giant weapons pylons. well, they're weapons pylons in my mind.
BTW, this was a redesign of my Sovereign base design, which i created originally with no technological requirements (0 mini bonus, no functional components - i created a "cheat game" to do this easily, and just spent a day designing ships. and yeah, what can i say, the star trek writers have a knack for memorable names. but this model was released after i'd researched the black hole generator and black hole eruptor, so i redubbed the ship class Horizon Treader, a double entendre referecning both the CS Lewis book/ship "Dawn Treader" and the event horizon of a black hole. considering it also had a base movement of 25, i had a 70% speed bonus, and the ultradrive event had occurred, you could also conflate it with The Event Horizon, the possessed ship in the movie of the same title starring Laurence Fishborne).
anywho, sometimes i don't like your art. don't take that as an offense, please. overall i think the art in this game is amazing. but one thing i'm not sure you fully understand about this ship designer is that it caters to the artistic sides of your fan base. personally, i like variety.
i realize one of the points of having visible functional components is so that you can plainly see what the AI has researched. but the AI ships are freaking UGLY. i can't tell you how many times i've looked at a ship up close to see nothing but its entire port side tiled with disruptors.
what i'd really like to do is redesign a number of the AI's ship hulls. i think a little bit of creative designing could fix that problem, help the problem of polygon number, and also give players like Kyro and myself more artistic freedom.
... this post is turning into something more appropriate for the mod boards, and i should move it over there. but i'm on a roll, and there's an audience here. Kyro, i'm not sure if you can pick up where my line of thinking is headed on this, but basically two ideas:
a mod designed to help GC2 run with fewer polys by making all functional comps have no art; the tradeoff would be that you lose the convenience of being able to see what's on a ship by looking at it. personally, i wouldn't care about this. when i want to know how strong a ship is, i look at its numbers. when i want to know what kind of tech a race has, i look at my espionage or diplomacy screen. this would be a pretty easy mod to make.
what i'm more interested in is a mod based on improving the way component art works. this would require modding the comp files and the AI base ship files. whether or not functional comp art should be jewelry is a question i want to set aside for this. i'm more interested in modding the AI ship designs so that they look nicer. i think there are creative solutions that wouldn't require hard reprogramming.
create a new comp that serves as a hard point cap: it does nothing more than fill the hard point you put it onto. since there's no art, it shouldn't affect your GPU processing right?
redesign the ship bases the AI uses, and fill all but a few of the hard points with this hard point cap. that way the auto-placer is forced to put components onto one of only a few available spots. this should be easy assuming you could just rename the file for a user-designed ship that had no technology on it... right?
redesign the hard points on all of the functional components, so that there is 1 and only 1 hard point on each, located at the comp's "docking point" (not sure what to call the bottom of the lego piece); that way, functional components would stack on each other perfectly. i'm making the assumption that the programming can auto-place a comp on top of another comp, but i'm pretty sure i've seen it place on jewelry, i don't think it'd be an issue. and there's the chance that unlike comps would get stacked. i still think that'd be better than a floating disco ball of disruptors
throw in no-art hull point extendors, and it sounds like a great art-renovation mod to me, that might also help very artistic players manage their own poly count a little bettter.
BoogleBac (and everyone else at SD) i hope you don't take offense to the words i used. some of my statements are criticism, but they're meant to be constructive. and i try to be funny. moreover, i realize your resources are limited. that's why i'd be intrested in developing this idea myself (or preferably with one or two other fans - again, you interested Kyro? I'm gonna watch this list).
now that you're adding an easy mod interface, do you think you'll add a way to download stardock-approved mods, including updated versions when available, directly from SDC? that'd rock my socks. the biggest reason i don't seek out other player-mods right now is the task of keeping track of them separately. but the longer i play, the more intrested i am in modding.
anyway, (this is what i posted in the beginning).i still vote to include the "hard-point only hulls" aspect of Kyro's mod. heck, maybe just write them in as a 4th hull option, rather than eliminating or making as-jewelry the hull comps you all ready have. anyone designing super-elaborate ships is probably all ready running into polygon count issues, so i don't see it having a hugely negative affect on the group of players just designing basic ships with funtional components.
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