Bowfin Light Fighter

[DraQ]

I'm impressed by canopy texture, it fakes the transparency and internal lighting in the best of '90s styles when transparency and extra polys were expensive and you couldn't count on tons of shaders and detailed lighting model to save your rear when it came to making your model look impressive.

[FluffyFreak]

Damn that's really good looking, and I agree with DraQ about the semi-transparent cockpit too, I was worried it might cause z-ordering artefacts but because it's still mostly opaque it works brilliantly!

[DraQ]

Wait, I've only seen it on screenshots so far - is it fake transparency or true one?
Either way it looks great.

[bobtheterrible]

Thanks, and nice to see you around. :)

Still about - we survived the first storm intact but work just got busy again so not much free time to allocate.

I want to keep down the tiny paneling detail that's so prevalent in sci-fi ship designs.

Thats a good thing. Having been on an airplane recently I couldn't help noticing the panelling on the wings and engines. All a bit grubby and uneven in places but clearly functional. The Bowfin's panelling looks believable :)

[nozmajner]

Actually on the sceenshots there's a shading error on the cockpit, caused by the normal map. I think The mod has the correction for that.
EDIT: eh, it wasn't fixed in the mod, but now it is.

[nozmajner]

Another bit of update for the mod file.
I've added all of the tags, and included it's crude cockpit to show the view from it.
For the cockpit to work, the default_cockpit.sgm needs to be deleted from data/models/misc/default_cockpit/
EDIT: I've also placed the thrusters to their final location and drilled in the nozzles. The texture doesn't yet know about all of them though.

@fluffyfreak: I was unable to set the cockpit for this ship. I put it next to it, and made the bowfin_cockpit.model file, and updated the ship.lua to point to it, but it didn't showed up. Same thing happens when I put the cockpit files to data/models/misc/bowfin_cockpit. Only the default one shows up either way.

Another cosmetic thing I noticed: While rotating the ship midflight, the head inertia feels a bit off in this case, since the cockpit feels attached to the head of the pilot, no parallax is visible at all. (Like what you could see with the head-rotation feature, look at the nose of the ship fro example from the corner of the view.). Would it be possible to replace the slight inertial rotation with slight lateral movement for the head? I think that fine parallax effect would add a nice sense of dimensionality. Heh, maybe even a bit of movement for ship lateral accelerations too, if I'm allowed to be greedy :D

And another thing to nag you with :). Would it be possible to show thruster plume from the cockpit view? If their placement is problematic, I can place tags in the cockpit model too, with the same name as in the model if needed.

[FluffyFreak]

Another bit of update for the mod file.
I've added all of the tags, and included it's crude cockpit to show the view from it.
For the cockpit to work, the default_cockpit.sgm needs to be deleted from data/models/misc/default_cockpit/
EDIT: I've also placed the thrusters to their final location and drilled in the nozzles. The texture doesn't yet know about all of them though.

@fluffyfreak: I was unable to set the cockpit for this ship. I put it next to it, and made the bowfin_cockpit.model file, and updated the ship.lua to point to it, but it didn't showed up. Same thing happens when I put the cockpit files to data/models/misc/bowfin_cockpit. Only the default one shows up either way.

Another cosmetic thing I noticed: While rotating the ship midflight, the head inertia feels a bit off in this case, since the cockpit feels attached to the head of the pilot, no parallax is visible at all. (Like what you could see with the head-rotation feature, look at the nose of the ship fro example from the corner of the view.). Would it be possible to replace the slight inertial rotation with slight lateral movement for the head? I think that fine parallax effect would add a nice sense of dimensionality. Heh, maybe even a bit of movement for ship lateral accelerations too, if I'm allowed to be greedy :D

And another thing to nag you with :). Would it be possible to show thruster plume from the cockpit view? If their placement is problematic, I can place tags in the cockpit model too, with the same name as in the model if needed.

There were a couple of problems with the code which I've explained in the PR but there were also a couple of minor issues with the `bowfin_cockpit.model` which I changed to this:

Code: Select all

material Fuselage-material
diffuse 1.0 1.0 1.0
specular 0.9 0.9 0.9
shininess 69
tex_diff bowfin_diff.png
tex_spec bowfin_spec.png
tex_norm bowfin_norm.png

material Canopy-material
diffuse 1.0 1.0 1.0
specular 0.9 0.9 0.9
shininess 69
opacity 46
tex_diff bowfin_diff.png
tex_spec bowfin_spec.png
tex_norm bowfin_norm.png

mesh bowfin_cockpit.dae

Then all i had to do to the "bowfin.json" file was change:

Code: Select all

   "cockpit" : "bowfin_cockpit",

And it worked with my fixes. If you want to test it with your current version you can use:

Code: Select all

   "cockpit_model" : "bowfin_cockpit",

Instead and that should work, but be aware that it will changed back to "cockpit" when I merge that PR later today :)

It would be good to get the thruster plumes to display wouldn't it, I shall have a think about it. Might be best to create an issue for it and assign it to me.

Andy

[FluffyFreak]

Also I found a neat tool for editing JSON files

http://tomeko.net/software/JSONedit/

It makes dealing with them a lot easier and you can see everything in a tree view and so understand the nesting etc :)

[nozmajner]

Thanks, I've updated the above mod.

[nozmajner]

Another little update for the Bowfin. Some texture fixes, normal baking and such. Also LoDs.

One thing I noticed that the normal maps are a bit odd, generating strange artifacts all over the place, compared to the model viewed in Blender. Most visible on the gun turret and on the back of the ship, around the middle line there. Less visible are large oddly shaded patches on the belly. (Sorry, can't post pictures yet, since picasa is being shot down, and I'm yet to figure out, how to embedd google photos images.)