Replacing the Big Crappy Station

[FluffyFreak]

I suppose that if it were enclosed then it would work like a large, multi-stage, airlock.
So you wouldn't de-pressurise and re-pressurise the entire bay repeatedly.
Also it might only be partially pressurised and use multiple "shields" to keep the low-pressure atmosphere in, sort of like an large electromagnetic collar and ionising the air... <-- see my handwavium!!!

Also it looks really pretty so far :D

[nozmajner]

I've managed to test the station in-game.
Here's the mod file for the adventurous. It replaces both stations and since you can't land on it, it breaks the game a bit. You can start from Barnard's star to check it out.
Be aware that it is heavily work in progress. Heavy polycount, No rotation, no collision, 4K placeholder baked in lighting textures and you can't dock back to it since it doesn't yet have landing pad collision.
But the scale of it is starting to show if you fly around inside. The outside is ugly as hell too and it's using one of the original textures.
Please tell me the performance you experience, since it has quite an amount of tris (100k+) and a lot of separate objects and 2 4k textures. I hope I can squeeze even more polies in it for even more detail, if it's possible.

[Zordey]

Well 8fps from Earth start... 8fps from Barnards star start (using your station). Makes little difference to me on my useless work laptop :)

There appears to be an invisible forcefield half way through that I crashed into (but got through after taking a bit of a run at it...)

[nozmajner]

Invisible shield? There's a 2m cube hidden in there somewhere so the engine doesn't generate a bounding box collision. Could it be that you hit that?

[Zordey]

if its exactly in the middle, then yes I probably dinged my nice shiny new facelift Deneb off it :S

[nozmajner]

Yupp, that should be it, but I don't know why it's invisible.

[Zordey]

It probably isnt... 2m cube is pretty small inside that hanger and I was looking at the walls not where I was going :)

[Tichy]

I tried the heavier version (yes, i lurk on #pioneer :P) at Barnard's Star and the game at 1920x1200 goes at 30fps constant (with vsync), inside and outside the station (which is amazingly big, and I like that! :) ). I think is very good! Usually, my worst framerate is near cities (15-20fps).

I crashed into the cube, too! :D

specs:
core2 quad 8400, 8GB ram,
Ati radeon HD6770 with open source drivers
Arch Linux with kernel 3.12.0 and mesa 9.2.3

[nozmajner]

That heavier version is absurd with that ~600k tri handrails, 100mb dae just for the rails. :D I hope simple quads with transparent textures will do the job convincingly for that.
It works fine for me too, 30-50 fps but that's no reason to avoid optimalization :)

[FluffyFreak]

I get a solid 60fps on my laptop but it is still quite a good spec with an nVidia GTX 650m (2GB ram) and an i7-3630QM cpu, Windows 8.1 64-bit - 8GiB ram.

The station looks really good, I think it'll make an excellent replacement for big_crappy and hoop.

Quads & texture is the way to go for rails etc, you just can't have that kind of incidental detail taking up so much geometry!!! :) There's a few places you can shift the triangle budget around a but. It would be easier for you and give you more options if we supported normal mapping but until we go actually shader only... then you could bake the geometry down into a normal map for the doors, seams and a few other bits.