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What can you do in Sins?

modding
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IskatuMesk
IskatuMesk
Join Date 03/2009
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Reply #26 March 16, 2009 3:35:51 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums

I can't UVW so I can't really say how painful they would be to map. It looks ridiculously confusing from what I saw, though.

 

As I said, most of my ships are sub-10k. Many of them are around ~5k-6k. Quads, that is. I did have to triangulate them for Homeworld 2 but even large amounts of very high poly ships did not impact performance, at least not nearly as much as having a handful of turrets.

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IskatuMesk
ManSh00ter
Join Date 02/2008
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Reply #27 March 16, 2009 4:41:29 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums

Its not confusing once you figure out the basis, but from what I can see on the models, the high amount of angular geometry means that you would spend a lot of time UV mapping small surfaces, and would pretty much be limited to planar projections for it. Especially if you later anted to add a lot more detail using something like Z-Brush, because you can't take shortcuts such as overlapping UV's or what I like to call "trash surfaces", where you apply the projections on small, hardly visible surfaces, then bunch them all together and cover them with a flat color of choice.

But the poly count sound ok for Sins and again, the models are very nice. Sins engine is very robust when handling large amounts of objects on screen.

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IskatuMesk
IskatuMesk
Join Date 03/2009
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Reply #28 March 17, 2009 8:16:00 PM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums

Anyone mind answering those questions about the weapon specs and stuff on the previous page?

 

I have XSI now, so once I get everything up and running I'll try to throw in the Artemes or something. Schizophrenia is really killing my motivation to do anything right now so it's hard to get started.

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IskatuMesk
Terraziel
Join Date 02/2006
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Reply #29 March 17, 2009 8:41:40 PM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums

Alright, DamagePerBank figures out the direction of hardpoints and the weapon to which they are assigned from the orientation and name of the Dummy (in Max atleast) object on the model, the number of the hardpoints pointing in that direction is solely for visuals, 1 dummy facing left will do the same damage as 4 dummies facing left

PreBuffCooldownTime is the reload of the actual damaging factor of the weapon, so set at 10 the damage will be applied every 10 seconds, this is also distinct from the visuals your weapon could never stop firing but it will only apply damage every 10 seconds

Burstcount and delay are for the visuals, a burst count of one on a missile will fire (visually) one missile, a burstcount of two = two missiles, but the damage will remain the same, note that it is instances of the particle assigned, so for autocannons the weaponeffect is a "burst" of 3 bullets so a burstcount of two would fire 6. the delay simply states the time between volleys

 EDIT

oh and there is a line in Gameplay.constants called ConsiderBeingDamaged time, which i take to be the interval of time between which the engine updates damage  

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IskatuMesk
IskatuMesk
Join Date 03/2009
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Reply #30 March 17, 2009 9:54:57 PM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums

I see. So the engine has some kind of unusual client/server setup, a bit like diablo 2. Syncing those could be hilariously difficult.

 

Quite odd that the damage doesn't come from the individual weapons either.

 

Thanks for the answers, gives me a bit more to think about when I go to design weaponry.

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IskatuMesk
TFL BigBANGtheory
Join Date 02/2007
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Reply #31 March 18, 2009 4:04:45 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums

I did have to triangulate them for Homeworld 2 but even large amounts of very high poly ships did not impact performance, at least not nearly as much as having a handful of turrets.

That is because of something called mesh instancing where the ship numbers scale better, the trick with turrets is to have the GPU do some of the calculations as the hardware is better optimised for tasks like vector addition. Anyhow Sins doesn't have proper turrets yet it uses dummy points on the mesh for weapon emitters.

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