New Turret

[Olrox]

You mean when the howitzer is aiming at high angles?
About the recoil, I can assure you that the barrels could enter 4/5 of their length and they wouldn't appear across the turret's walls.
:rolleyes:
I've already thought out a solution for that problem, I'll post it ASAP.

[Olrox]

Ok, the adaptations were few, I really overlooked the fact that the gun's actually a howitzer and would fire at very high angles. Therefore, the armour plates shouldn't be fixed, they must move along with the barrels. I've made a new model based on my first one, there are some useless faces I´ll remove if we keep this design.

Features are the same, the screenshots show the gun pointing at 0°, 30° and 60°, and the "shield" doesn't intersect the rest of the turret at any angle from 0° to 65°. Adaptations should be simple if we need higher angles.

Keep the turrets comin! I'd love to put them on fortresses! How about a better big cannon turret? 150mm that they use on tanks today would be cool!

You mean a multi-barreled turret with 4 heavy cannons?
I was thinking about making weapons with higher caliber and slower reloading, for a more concentrated damage. I think the "earthquake" (the second howitzer you get, I'm not sure about the name) is a 240mm, therefore each of the howitzers at this turret I've made is intended to be 320mm. Reloading for each would take some minutes, but the firing would deal heavy concentrated area damage.
But we could think about something like that:

"Special" artilley: Much higher damage, longer range, much slower ROF. (Base eater)
"Special" cannon: Slightly higher damage, slightly longer range, slightly higher ROF. (Medium & light tank eater)
"Special" missile: Higher damage, same range, slower ROF, higher accuracy. (Heavy tank eater)
"Special" machinegun: Slightly higher damage, much higher ROF, same range. (Cyborg eater)
"Special" AA: Much higher damage, much slower ROF, longer range. (Vtol eater)

Sorry for the retarded nicknames, I'm too lazy to think about something better

BUT
That's a dream right? Chances are we are going to wait a long time if we are ever going to see those ingame.
Again, it's the sort of thing I'm going to put into my RTS, I think it's cool but it won't be easy. I was not expecting that it would be easy, anyway.

Regards, Olrox

[milo christiansen]

Cool!! Now we need ships to mount it on. Ships, because it would look weird on any thing else.
Edit: After some thought it would look ok on a fort too.

[Tenoh]

How about a new turret for current weapons at least?
150 mm cannon i mentioned would be for the tanks as single.

[thelion]

The last iteration looks very nice. The rotating armor looks very appropriate.

Ship? We could also use it instead of various bunkers. Then we can see it ingame quickly as it would be updating the graphics.

Here's where I'm moving, in the meantime, as far a bunker-type:





There is some space in the lower underside of the turret and the top of the bunker, and I'm thinking what should go there.

[Olrox]

How about a new turret for current weapons at least?

Hmm...
I think that we got some interesting ideas here. It smells like work.

Adding a "s" to the topic name? We could do that. But we need some essential needs we need fulfilled.

The questions are:

Who's gonna make the models?
Who's gonna map and make the textures?
Who's gonna convert it into pie and replace the ingame models?

If we achieve all of the subjects then we are ready to begin a much bigger project, which needs to be organized before we begin (if we are really going to).

Therefore, here's a checklist:

- 3d artist(s) - for modelling & mapping;
- 2d artist(s) - for making textures;
- Modder - for messing with PIEs and modifying game files.

Anyone who's willing to join our cause ( xD ) feel free to send me a PM. The objective should be making detailed turret art, with more detailed textures and geometry. There's going to be a lot of work to do.

Someone had a mod with the same purpose back on 2007, I think, but it seems like the topic was deleted due to inactivity, the OP gave up due to someone's heavy criticism, lack of motivation or whatsoever. But if we are able to gather up a team, results should come out fast and motivation shouldn't be a problem. And heavy criticism makes up for a better work, mostly.

I apply for the first two subjects, but I'll need help to convert my files into .PIE.

For the people who want to give feedback and participate passively in the proccess, I'll create a topic named: "[MOD] - All-new Art for Turrets", if we start!

[Olrox]

About your new version, thelion, I think that it has too many useless faces (faces that we won't notice at all while looking at the ingame model, or that we could get the same effect of the face making intelligent texturizing).
I myself, at the beginning of my modelling works, made models much like yours. Many faces that wouldn't make any difference, unproportional parts, lack of a real knowledge behind my designs. Also, I used to make models forgetting that they would have textures. And I made many models, dozens of them, which never got ingame.

Actually, the only things I've managed to see of my works into the game were a factory model which I designed (BP made a model based on one of my versions) and a texture I've made for Tiuz's Gate mod. Right now, he's working towards inserting a gate model that was thought, designed, mapped and texturized by me, and I'm... anxious.

Truth said, I'm really disappointed here. Because most of my hours and hours of work weren't used at all, because I was working alone and couldn't manage to learn all the aspects of modding.

That's why I say, don't give up, keep making models. But don't expect that all of them are going to get into the game. I advise, make some good planning, gather up a team and divide the tasks, rather than making everything yourself or making only part of the work and wait for someone to show up. It took me more than 2 years to realize that, even though it may seem obvious.

Regards, Olrox.

[thelion]

I can convert to .pie via .3ds to .pie converter. Getting the model ingame insofar as animation is difficult, however. Pieslicer doesn't work on windows 7, therefore I cannot check if the dimensions and number of parts is identical to original model. That would leave the model unanimated.

As far as I know, turrets (for defense) are 2-piece, and (for bodies) are 1-piece, so that's what we might aim for. Of course, then like in vanilla WZ, turrets can swivel on xz plane, but not xy plane. I am currently working on figuring out WZ scripting in the meantime, but that'll take a while before anything useful from me comes out.

As far as the model, I'll work on removing excess faces:

[Olrox]

Hmm, if you have enough space on your HD you could install something like Windows 98 as a secondary OS. A friend of mine done that to play DOS games without emulators xD

But that's the right path, if you are willing and dedicated enough, you will manage to do great things. Also, having some extra free time doesn't hurt anybody

I wish you the best of luck, and look forward to making some kick-ass models with you!

Best regards, Olrox

[i-NoD]

Cool art

Getting the model ingame insofar as animation is difficult, however.

Might i ask what do you want to animate? Recoil animation is automatically made by the game engine.

As far as I know, turrets (for defense) are 2-piece, and (for bodies) are 1-piece, so that's what we might aim for.

AFAIK, if you're creating a simple turret for structures or non-cyborg droids it should consist of a gun part (gn<name>.pie) and a turret part (tr<name>.pie) or a gun part only. And there should be only gun part for cyborgs.
Both part can be rotated, but only gun part can be pitched.
So, i guess you just move the barrels to the gun part and all other things to the turret part.

[thelion]

Thanks for the info.

BTW, what is preferable polycount of all parts to aim for, if making updated turrets for (1) bodies, (2) bunkers, and (3) cyborgs? 400 triangles, 600 triangles, and 200 triangles max?

[Olrox]

Bunkers and turrets are generally the same model, aren't they?
Finding a poly limit is a difficult thing, I mean...
I remember when I was making body models way back in time, hehehe
Coyote proposed the following, based on a conversation between him and Grim:
http://docs.wz2100.net/utilities/discussiononpolys.html
That's why we've got to keep an eye out for poly count.
A few pointers on how I reduce poly count:

-Only use 4~6 segments to make a 360° curve (circle). If you intend on doing 180° curves, use 2~3 segments. For 90°, 1 or 2 only.
-Don't make small relief in the geometry. Careful texturizing solves the problem and doesn't lower performance (if you use the standard texture page size, I mean). If you really need to make relief, make it very visible so the players can see the additional geometry from usual zoom distance. Generally, players only zoom in to see units in the first month of gameplay.
-Don't make holes in the guns' barrels, it adds (number of curve steps of the cylinder) + 1 polygon, and players won't notice it. again, a nice texture simulates the hole and doesn't lower performance.
-While making "walls" in the model, avoid leaving the top polygons if the wall is thin. Again, this kind of detail can't be seen if you are on the standard zoom distance.

If you keep that in mind, it should be easier to get lower poly counts. If you notice that you forgot about some of these, a few vertex welds should solve the problem.

Also, special models are special, if we are making a special weapon we shouldn't bee too paranoic about poly count, because we won't see a lot of those ingame, actually.

Regards, Olrox.

[Zarel]

Thanks for the info.

BTW, what is preferable polycount of all parts to aim for, if making updated turrets for (1) bodies, (2) bunkers, and (3) cyborgs? 400 triangles, 600 triangles, and 200 triangles max?

Let's go with 200.

[Olrox]

Let's go with 200.

Hi Zarel!

hmm, 200 polygons or triangles? :rolleyes: Thelion was talking about triangles, but the game engine processes up to 10-sided not necessarily coplanar polygons, isn't it?
I remember a discussion about how the graphics were processed, that the game engine processed polygons then the GPU had them broken into triangles for processing anyway, or something like that, and I don't know if the engine had any significant changes in graphics processing...
In addition, I think that Watermelon (long time since I've last heard from him) spoke that the polygon limit for each .pie was 512, but the vertex limit was also 512.

This topic has much information on what I'm speaking, may be interesting to take a look.

I would be very grateful if you could give us some light on those limits! xD

[whippersnapper]

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It's been great seeing the evolution of this turret's art. Also, the practical information aggregated here is extremely useful for those getting their feet wet with making WZ art assets..

You guys might consider creating a dedicated IRC channel for the proposed team approach by Olrox. In my experience Net Teams seem to prefer getting together in real time on IRC to doing the BB posting thing. But of course BB interactions can serve as important supplementals to such efforts.. Both are also sound sources of documenting your process.

ALSO -

Even though you may not be making any changes in the code base documenting is no less important because there is always more than one way to implement and once you get into lots of these changes it is very easy to forget just which method you used for any given change and if you have to back-track through .txt files to re-figure stuff out (for example) you've done weeks ago it is a HUGE PITA and waste.

Best document as you go along.

That's what I came to with "WS" and I have a good memory but still I was not remembering exactly HOW I did this or that after a few weeks but now I document as I go along and it's so much better, makes a complex project so much easier to track.

Regards, whip
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