building stations

posted on January 26th, 2009, 4:14 am

hey I have noticed when building borg stations (or others IDK) normaly as you are building a station it is slowly built until it is done and it looks like it too but right now some of the borg stations look like they are done when they are only half way done (I think a good example would be the recycling center) and its not realy something that NEEDS to be fixed but it would be nice and give it that finished feeling if you know what I mean

posted on January 26th, 2009, 4:21 am

its because the rest of it is the inner layer being built that gives the borg stations that nice glow and bumpy look...

just think of this way, they build the outter shell first then do all the corridors

[Dominus_Noctis]

posted on January 26th, 2009, 4:45 am

Last edited by Dominus_Noctis on January 26th, 2009, 5:20 am, edited 1 time in total.

Actually I believe it is an error, where the entire thing "builds" in a split second when you zoom in on the construction... considering that the worker bees still zoom along doing their thing, even though no detail is altered

posted on January 26th, 2009, 12:29 pm

the way stations are build cannot influenced much. still, i will create a todo for that to atleast look at it if there is a 'nicer' way or workaround for that animation.

posted on January 26th, 2009, 3:46 pm

I actually LOVE the way that the Borg stations are built, starting from only little tiny points, and blossoming out into HUGE structures, that you don't even get what they're for. It's awesome. I love it.

posted on January 26th, 2009, 10:55 pm

Wait, Doca you said that it can't be changed much: do the Borg have a seperate build mechanic than the other races that's causin this? (I thought they used the same worker bee mechanic as all the other races) 

posted on January 27th, 2009, 1:05 am

what he means is the way the armada engine puts the messhes together cannnot be influenced very much, sure you can make the mesh and design your own builds and beams and stuff but how the engine intreprets it being put together can't really be influenced. As borg stations use layers to give depth the engine just chooses the outside first and as they are alot more square and require less polies they pop up a lot faster then say a fedstation which has more. Most of the fancy part of a borg station is done in their remarkable texture work.

posted on January 27th, 2009, 2:09 am

Ahh gotcha 

Perhaps then a special "flash" of green or something could be emitted... and in the aftermath the station is there... as if the structural components had been assembled en masse by nanoprobes or something (perhaps even just a big cloud of nanoprobes could appear over the structure, disappearing when the structure's main mesh is largely built).. dunno 

posted on January 30th, 2009, 1:46 am

no what he means is it does not affect game play but it can be changed with some tga files that are edited thats all and this is the main reason I asked cause I know that its something that can be fixed.

posted on January 30th, 2009, 2:10 am

posted on January 30th, 2009, 2:30 am

no what he means is it does not affect game play but it can be changed with some tga files that are edited thats all and this is the main reason I asked cause I know that its something that can be fixed.

dont get peoples hopes up, that is not what he means...

He means the way armada sees the sod and decides to put it together cant be influenced much as its in the engine code that decides how it all goes together and thats nasty to mess with.

posted on January 30th, 2009, 11:13 am

no what he means is it does not affect game play but it can be changed with some tga files that are edited thats all and this is the main reason I asked cause I know that its something that can be fixed.

I have to agree with redmanmark there it is indeed armada that decides what the stations look like while being constructed.

I would love to see more options for what's built first and then on destruction how the parts break up but that's asking a bit much.

It's nothing to do with tgas.

posted on January 30th, 2009, 12:20 pm

yep it has nothing to do with the textures (the TGAs). You can actually influence the order in which model parts are assembeled (or disassembeled). Its defined by the order of the vertices written in the SOD file (well i dont recall at the moment if it was from top to bottom or from bottom to top, but you get the message). Depending on your modeling tool that becomes quite easy to handle. If you are using the old 3D Max exporter the most left element (in the hierarchy tree) is assembeled first.

Note that this does only apply to geometry nodes, light nodes are not constructed

A better looking construction animation is planed for a major graphics update in a v3 patch, but its yet unsure how far i will go (its much of modeling for all vessels of all races)

posted on January 30th, 2009, 12:34 pm

so thats how Armada handles it all...

Optec on a different question, are you lot ever going to release  the custom exporter you created for the new versions of Studio Max? Im sure it would help loads of people who want to create ships for an FO version of Armada.

posted on February 1st, 2009, 2:32 pm

actually i use the old one i planed to make a new one but didn't find the time to do so