Topics

16

Artwork / Alien hoverbot

« on: April 17, 2007, 09:21:23 pm »

Here's a very quick blockup of an alien hoverbot:



The side things are more fans than turbines, though. They rotate around to provide foward/reverse/turning motions.

The gun is garbage - it's just there to show where the gun goes. I also figured that having the gun turret on top would make it more difficult to fire at humans that are downward.

17

Artwork / Polymer

« on: April 15, 2007, 03:59:31 am »

Here's a polymer I whipped up in about an hour.


(The background isn't black, it's transparent. View the image itself if you're having trouble seeing the darker ones.)
I suppose it would be for things like Aircraft Polymers. Most polymers compose long chains that loop back in on themselves. Perhaps technology is advanced enough that they can actually be woven.

I followed a couple 'rules' I remember from Chem 209, but there's no way an actual molecule like this could exist.

It's not actually textured, I just coloured the materials. It should be easy to texture, anyways. Don't even have to leave Blender to do that.

Blend is here if you actually need it.
https://webdisk.ucalgary.ca/~djetowns/public_html/misc_files/UFO_AI/molecule1.blend

18

Feature Requests / Saving during missions.

« on: April 15, 2007, 01:14:33 am »

First of all, I agree with the developer's decision to disallow saving during combat. Save/reload cheating isn't much fun. It does ruin the atmosphere and takes away a lot of the "Oh, crap! I lost my best guy!" It becomes "Darn. Now I have to reload from two minutes ago. Next time I won't move my best guy in front of the window."

However, what about saving for legitimate reasons? What about if you're halfway through a two-hour mission and you need to stop playing?

The Fire Emblem games had a way of saving during combat without allowing save/reload cheating. After you saved, the game quit. When you resumed from the save, the save file is deleted.

For a PC, there's no way of preventing someone from copying the save file outside of the game, so maybe an ID system can be used. For each combat save file, there is an ID on the file and a corresponding ID in a table somewhere. If someone loads the savefile, then that ID is removed from the list and the savefile is deleted. If someone tries to load the savefile again (because they copied it outside the program) the game rejects it because the ID is invalid.

There should be a method to allow multiple campaigns, though. Perhaps the geoscape state is saved at the same time, and a player can choose the campaign save, first, then whether or not to resume the mission. (As far as I can tell, you can still reload from the beginning of a mission, right?)


Of course this method is not foolproof. Someone can hack into files to allow their ID. The source code is available, after all. However, that person needs to be technically minded enough to be able to do that, which puts that method out of the reach of many people.

On top of that, the source code is still public. They can just make their own version which comments out the lines forbidding invalid ID loads.


Or, if someone really wanted to save, they could just take a memory dump of the game in progress. I don't think there's any way of preventing that, even with the code that's there now.

19

Artwork / Possible new craft

« on: March 19, 2007, 03:00:07 am »

While reading through the Wiki, I got inspired.

I don't know if there has been much decided for any hybrid craft (terran-built with alien tech) but this ship here was partly a practice in organic modelling techniques.
(Click on the thumbnails for full screen.)




And Orthoganal with wires:



The engines would be antimatter, and they are centered around the center of gravity. They can rotate up 90 degrees, and down 125 degrees allowing it to hover.

The wings were designed to be really curvy. I actually sort of wanted to be reminiscent of a saucer, but it ends up looking like a manta ray or something.
The curviness has something to do with alien nanopolymer baking, if I recall correctly from the Wiki.

The two holes on the top are for, uh, whatever. I was thinking some kind of internal "zomg lazers pewpew" or maybe particle cannons or something.

The textures are garbage. I was messing around with vertex paint in Blender. I don't even know if it's an alien or human craft.

So... is there any room for this?


Edit: The polycount is quite high: 14k faces. Blender has decimation tools (and I can just turn subdivision down ) if it needs to be way lower for the game.