Replacing the Big Crappy Station

[bszlrd]

Let's revive this topic a bit. :)
I've remodelled a few parts, so the whole thing is more modular. This way we can reshuffle these parts to make another versions of this station. At least i hope so. All bay types can connect to each other now, with some additional facade where needed. All windowed facades are the same (there were 3 different height in the previous version).
It's quite far from completion, but the whole scene is more manageable then the previous one, so it's easier to work with.
I'm intended to give it a 10km diameter residential ring instead of the current 2km one.
* 36 small bays - 1 ring with 4 segments, 3*3 bay each (30m max) Natrix is the biggest that fits (31m long actually)
* 24 medium bays - 3 ring with 8 bays each (50m max) Deneb comes here, Neroida fits here too.


* 4 large bays - 1 ring with 4 bays (100m max) DSminer and Malabar comfortably fits here.


I think the smallest number of bays would be 9 small, 8 medium and 1 large, (or 4 medium and 2 large) bays in one ring. And I hope it will be possible to make at least a bigger one with a thicker residential ring.

Here's a mod with a very rudimentary 4K AO bake as texture. Could you guys check it out if there's any flickering or any visual glitch (apart from the ugly texture, that is). I'm experimenting a bit, the mesh isn't watertight, and there are small areas of overlap on a few places, in the name of easier modularization and tri-count lowering. I want to be sure that it doesn't introduces any glitch.
Also it's interior only, the external stuff from the old station is there too, even the old landing bays, and the interior doesn't exactly fit the old outside, so please bear with me. Also it doesn't rotate right now to make the glitch-hunting easier. I'm intending to give it a 0,044 rad/sec (2.53°/sec) rotation when it's finished (it means about 0.01G on the docks though). In theory that slow rotation will make manual landings possible.
Also again, I'd like to know if it performs good on your end, it has about 65k tris and I certainly want to add a bunch of smaller detail.


POV of a sinonatrix in a small bay.

Sinonatrix in the above bay

[FluffyFreak]

Bestest-biggest-bigcrappy-ever ;)

[bszlrd]

Thanks.
The above mod is updated with some smaller details like crane bases tanks and lamp-posts, which bumped the poly count a bit, so I'm curious about performance.

[Darkdesire]

Hello

nice station, i've just teste it => starting to new hope, asking launching, asking autopilot to dock with Eridani commercial center, my vessel approach your station, entering in the first ring and waiting, never been able to dock (vessel stay in autopilot and wait something, but i don't know what)

hopping it can help

Cheers

[robn]

@Darkdesire, its not finished - it doesn't have collision surfaces and docking locators yet.

[bszlrd]

Thanks for testing.
Yes, I didn't yet set up any landing bays and their collisions properly, I'm just concentrating on the geometry right now.

[bszlrd]

OK, I made some progress with this station. The internal is completly UV-ed, but it needs some tiny details and stuff. No textures yet apart from a raw AO pass with several errors.


This image is from the model viewer.
Note that the mod crashes the game currently!

I have a problem though. I can't set up the docking.
One thing is that the whole docking markers are rotatet by -90 on the X axis, but that's not really a problem for me.
My problem is, I get an assertion on game start:

I read trough fluffyfreak's PR about docking, and I also checked the other stations, but I can't figure out what I did wrong.

Is it because I try to set it up like if it was a ground station, with the absolute minimum automatic docking sequence? Or I made some error in the station.lua?

[FluffyFreak]

I'll take a look sometime today :)
I think you have to set it up with full docking, the system is not very flexible sadly, I just stuck a prettier front end onto it so that you didn't have to manually type the docking process into Lua but I didn't change the internals much.

[FluffyFreak]

Ah ha, you're mixing up usage of "new_crappy" and "newcrappy", the filename is "newcrappy.model" but in the lua definition you call it "new_crappy" so it can't find the model - it looks for it by name - so instead loads the error model fallback.
You should have a message in your output.txt telling you it couldn't find the new_crappy model.

After that it errors out because of the number of docking stages. I've got to start work now so run out of time to check anything more this morning.

[FluffyFreak]

Ok, I think you're going to have to setup the docking and leaving stages a lot like the existing big_crappy. Only as in the number of entries.

On the plus side you don't need multiple "approach_" entries, they're shared between each of the bays within a group (of bays), make sense?

If you can think of a better way of working it then speak up because I will sit down and write it!