Replacing the Big Crappy Station

[foran]

I can't waiting see the new spaceport in the game!!
good job! mate. keep going!

[nozmajner]

Thanks for the info @fluffyfreak. I must be stoopid, or at least tired with that naming dash error. :) I'll try just copy pasting the big crappy's docking stuff for now and build from there.

[FluffyFreak]

No worries, I had to go through the code before I realised what it was doing. I should have checked the output first :/

As I said if there's anything that's proving to be a lot of work or could be done better in the modelling package you use then tell me and I'll see about making it work that way instead.
For example it might better to use splines to guide the ships in, or perhaps boxes defining volumes where the AI is allowed to fly and things like that... not sure how to implement stuff like that but if you can think of better ways from an artists perspective then suggest them and I'll try to work them out.

It's good to iterate on these kinds of things to get them working as good as they can and for that I need feedback from people trying to use them.
My limited art skills mean that my own feedback is only able to address the minimum amount of things.

[nozmajner]

Here comes an actually usable version of the station. It has the same docking pads as the old crappy, and you can dock with it. The mod file replaces both stations, so you don't have to hunt for it.
You can't collide with it yet.

It has a placeholder 10km diameter residental ring. It has quite slow roatation, about 0.42 rpm (aiming at 1G at the rim). This feels quite good and should make manual landing doable. Gravity would be a tiny 0.04G at the docking pads.

I've already found an issue, a hole really between the medium and small docking areas which needs fixing. Other than this, I'd appreciate some testing and glitch hunting. :) Also don't forget to check your performance with it, since it has quite high poly count, about 173k tris and a couple of 4k textures.

[nozmajner]

And another update with a bunch of tiny details, like lamp-posts, reflectors, small access buildings, a couple of doors. The robotic cranes are also in. And you can also find several small trucks with standard containers on it. Most of the detailing pass is ready on the docks.

Tri-count is 242k (and it will certainly go up), so do tell me your performance with it.

I've started working on the habitat ring. I was a bit surprised by it's size when I put a vlastan building in it (that dark speck on the last image). The ring is about 1km wide, so plenty of space for the inhabitants. 112 square km if I calculated it correctly.
I'm quite curious how much time it will take to texture this beast.

[FluffyFreak]

I think you'd actually have to see my face to understand how excited I am about the progress you're making on this!

Having just tried it out (at my new job) it looks fantastic, docking just gave me goose bumps :D I'll get the necessary changes done for the single locator docking ASAP!

Oh and it runs at a solid 60FPS for me and this machine has a much lower end GPU, an nVidia "550 ti" with 1GiB ram.

Everyone should try this out :)

[Tichy]

Looks amazing! I'll try it as soon as I go home. :)

[FluffyFreak]

Took this with the Steam integration I was playing with :)
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-sJ6W ... _00001.jpg

[Tichy]

FPS at constant 60 here. But I recently updated my mobo and cpu.
The internals looks very nice and big (if you keep the speed low :) ).
Will you do a variant with two rings, for 2001 nostalgics? :)


What is this? Looks like a valve. Are those stations brought defalted into orbit, and then pumped up? ;)

[nozmajner]

Yes, I want to make some variants to spice it up a bit. I'm thinking about a smaller one (both the docks and the ring), and a double ring version should be possible too. Anyway it will be a good test of me thinking forward because my intention is to make the different parts modular, so I can lego a bit with it and create different versions.
And yes, that valve is similar to those on ground stations, but with less texturing for now :D