Hi guys

[DamoclesX]

Thanks to a helpfull dood I found this creativity section lol,

I"m build a free fan based game For battlestar galactica, using the starshatter engine, it is currently being rebuilt to support all the new dx9 features and has frankly the most advanced material and mod/game features I have seen

Some of my pervious work is here, just so you know I"m not full of it and that we will go through with this lol

http://members.shaw.ca/holdtheline/

I already grabbed some of the meshes here, very very impressive work, of course all I can really use them for is generating blueprints to help modeling the game models,

what I was wondering, is there any blueprints or meshes of the basestars, civilian ships, the new mkV vipers?

Also, is there any reference for the types of weapons, what they do, how many each ship has, armor ratings, speed, range, all that stuff.

Starshatter supports a full range of vars like speed, mass, thrust, fuel, range, sensor range, detection ranges, ship systems with types and numbers of spare parts!

Not to meniton you can do anything with weapons, in the B5 mod we had a gun that would shoot out a flak projectil that would blow up at a certain range from the target

Thanks guys, any help at all would be great.

DamoclesX@shaw.ca

[thomas7g]

That is pretty impressive! I would love to fly in a real viper from the show. The video game was great to fly in, but I would prefer a REAL one and if you can do it MORE POWER TO YA!

I really liked the images on your site. And if you could to the same for a viper that would make me drool!

:drool:

Btw, there is a viper comparison thread in the main BG forum. It has an actual 3/4 view of all the canon vipers from new and old show. And the new viper renders are actually from the meshes used in the show.


There is also some art at our sister site 3dgladiators.com. 3DG is a small site, but it has a few professional level artist haunting it.

:)

[DamoclesX]

Interesting, thanks.

Once I get the ViperMKII done, and in game with some shots, I can start moving onto the others.

Eventually I want all the ships done, If I dont get bogged down in class I should be able to get a ship or 2 done a week, might be a bit slower, these ships have a lot more detail then your average b5 ship.

Ive seen some shots of some sort of cobra? and some other viper varients, are there models or prints of them out there?

also, what about the mk1 and mk2-4 vipers, any shots,models specs.. ANYTHING lol.

Got a lot to time to build up support so I know all the info will come eventually, right now I just am going to focus on getting the viper mk 2 done 100% and the cylon fighter

[DamoclesX]

hmm, I will check for those,, I have the galactica, a viper and a cyclon so far, and a bunch of pics of civi ships..

I would like to get as many cannon ships as possible and have them setup as cannon ships

As for fan designs.. I'll start thinking about those once the cannon ships are in, and I suspect that will take more then enought time to figure out what I"m gonna do with that factor.

http://www.firedragon.com/~cfleets/gallery/art/cobra_python_clouds.jpg

Are those your non-cannon designs? or are they based off the show?

I still fear that galactica model, those damn ribs.. they are not gonna be fun, they kill the polycount, and they are to noticible to be done by bump or normal mapping.


thanks for the info on the nug raider and centaurion even tho I have NO idea what those ships are.. I"m totaly clueless with this battlestar stuff, this is the first time I ever saw the show... and I love it!

[DamoclesX]

Ah okay,

I gotta ask, whats with the hull armor on the new battlestar?!?! why are massive areas of the ship lacking hull armor and showing bulkheads while others only have it in a few places, are all the battlestars like this? or is this one a super junker for some reason.

Maby, once this is flying, I"ll throw in the old show galactica and viper... as older models.. it seems to me thats what this show seems to imply, since it showed the old cylon in the first episode at that space station.

[thomas7g]

They really had a problem with designing this battlestar. The artist pulled out alot of decent designs, but they were all rejected because they were too similiar to the style of the old show.

I agree with you. THe use of armor seems really randomly placed. In the episode Water, where the hull was damaged, the thickness of the armor looks less that 6 inches thick.

I was wondring...is it posible for you to cheat the new battlestar. That is reduce the height of the ribs so it can be a bumpmap? I don't see how you can have the new battlestar in a game without massive use of the cpu.

:)

[DamoclesX]

Tell me about it.

I can push a 10k ship in the game and a decent rig will be able to handel it, but whats the point, with a single ship sucking that much power down in ADDITON to texture maps that I can tell already will be massive(and hell hard to make from scratch) it defeats the purpose.

I might try to cheat.. one way is like you say, make the "space" between the armor and the bulkhead a LOT smaller, then bumps would work, I wll try it out.


Once thing at least, once we get rolling and adding other battlestars we can fix that armor problem:) I really dont l ike it, I would be screaming mad if I was giving a ship with 60% of the damn armor missing lol

maby cause its old and such they just didnt bother to fix/replace the plates?? or maby they were being removed cause of de-commishining.. it just... makes no sence lol

I"m gonna start the Viper tonight, got the next 8 weeks with 0 tests or anything else comming up so i"m gonna spend a lot of time on this(my town is REALLY dull).

Hey, and chance on getting those old designs, I Think the show said there were 90 battlestars.. I find it unlikly they would all look alike.. not to mention battlestars seem to be the equlv of a supercarrier or modern day battleships... so they must have had what... 4 or 5x the number of smaller ships, support ships.. that kind of stuff

Oh ya, I guess at one point IU"ll need a list of all the solar systems, at least known, and the general area of the galaxy so I can add in more.. and any planet/moons in those systems(and what kinds.)

this is really fun to do but there is a LOT of info with this kind of power, you can create the entinre solar system, down to the planet texture, light color the sun gives off , backgrounds, astroids, moons, and even(though its a lot harder) SURFACE areas where you can fly over cities and stuff.

Plus I got a few tricks that let you do some really crazy stuff:) I"m still tweaking one of the tests but it loads up a small moon.... the real size it would be in real life.. and you can fly over the whole thing or fire into space.. of course there are still problems, one of them being no gravity LOL.. but they will be addressed at some point.


Finally, you guys should check out starshatter, www.starshatter.com, this is the engine this game will be built on, the game might not look like much with the stock ships, but check otu the b5 mod.

You can buy it right now actually, been out for a while, its still dx7 but as this very moment milo is converting to dx9 and has in fact posted some wip screens... the material editor, that you use to convert the ships.. is the most advanced I have ever seen in a game, you can assign materials and percentages and all that stuff like you would in MAX, very impressive.

Anyways, enough blabbing by me, time to get some food then start looking at mr viper!

[thomas7g]

Hmmm... 10K seems alwful tiny. I don't know if that is kilobytes or facets. I tend to model around 100,000 facets. And that usually takes up a few megs. Alot of megs. But then I don't have to move in realtime.
:D

Brw, I can plot the original starmap. The one on the original series galactica bridge. I rebuilt the old bridgemap in adobe illustrator. Its going to be refit to make it a tiny bit more accurate, but its VERY accurate as is. You can see hints of it in the background image for this page.

I could get to finish it again if it would help.

:)



btw- what is starshatter. Could you tell us a little bit about it? I'm totally in the dark here. :D

[DamoclesX]

That would be awsome about the starmap.

Well the original eng for starshatter is dx7, so when you factor in the MASSIVE amounts of turrents that will be needed, 10k might slow it down to much, it IS being ported to dx9 but that takes time.. so I wont know how much it will hurt until then.

Franky, I dont see any other way to do the armor and make it look decent, unlik other games in this on you can get RIGHT up close, into the launch tubes, fly through the hanger, at that distance you cant really get away with cheating on the model lol.

Starshatter is a space sim like freespace2, the difference is its designed from the ground up for mods, AND it allows full control of capital ships and fighters, so you will be able to control the galactica.

Here is the main starshatter site.

http://www.starshatter.com/

Milo, the main programmer, is beyond crack, he has done things that it takes TEAMS of programmers to do over months and months.

Here is what we did with that game with its dx7 engine and some imagination

http://members.shaw.ca/holdtheline/

At that point all starshatter supported was spec maps and very very basic/annoing shadows

This is the NEW material editor for the dx9 engine

http://www.starshatter.com/shots/Magic23.jpg

You can see that the power of it is slowly comming close to max, you can select the percentage of map used, the blends, the percentage of combining maps, you can design textures by just using colors, like glass, perl, or copper.

Not to mention you can use positive and neg numbers, so you can have bumps that go both ways.

Basically the material editor is what you use to assign other materials. You create the model in max or whatever you like, texture it, then import it, magic keeps the texture information for the diffuse map then you just go into the model and appy the other maps.

Oh, on another topic.

We talked about that armor on the galactica for a bit, my buddy and I have come to the conclusion that those ribbs are basically hull re-enforcments on top of the normal armor, and the rest of those plats on top of the ribs are extra armor, put on the top since it seems thats the face of the ship that seems to always point towards the enemy.

The ship might not be fully covered because A. it slows it down WAY to much and makes it a big target

or

B it slows it down enough that in peacetime there is no real point

[DamoclesX]

Been a while, I got caught up in some commercial work

The first pics are up here of the viper, still needs some work but it will give a general idea


http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=743360

Viper MKII

No idea on ANY of the others other then that mk7 or whatever, the others.. well I"m thinking for the mk1 I will make the original 70's viper, jsut for kicks and to give peeps who like that show something, for the others.. I"m open to fan suggestions

Up next, finish this baby, then the cylon raider... ya.. that looks like SOO Much fun lol..

[thomas7g]

That is looking pretty good!!

So how many polys did you shrink that mesh down to? Its a really good low rez version of it.:thumbsup:

[DamoclesX]

2600 polys all said and done, I could drop it to 2200 but it would take away to much in my opinion.

I got a workaround for galactic to in the works I think, its gonna have the ribs.. but I think I can fix mose of the problems, it wont look picture perfect to the show(I might skip every other rib if it comes down to it) but they will be there

I really dont know anything about the viper lines or that stuff.

I just figured we would throw the 70's fans a bone.

The whole setup is up to the community, we actaully got some good posts going on that forum trying to explain the tech, weapons loadouts and all that stuff.

I suspect more will get involved when they start seeing a lot more pics and info and such.

Where is this viper comparison chart?

[thomas7g]

Hey D, Was the original viper ever refered to by a model number in the series? I don't remember any scenes with it really mentioned. Hmmm...must check that tigh-Adama scene....


:)

[justjackrandom]

I really dont know anything about the viper lines or that stuff.

I just figured we would throw the 70's fans a bone.



It was only in G80 that model numbers were mentioned, and thus in my mind, are questionable.

I suggest that there are a number of sub variants of the “Mk II” (if that's what we are going to call it) in production. Considering that we actually saw a variety of Vipers (each of the set pieces had differences in line of those sections that were supposed to be to scale), plus the continuity errors and use of stock footage of the controls.

As for the nuBSG Galactica and the hodgepodge of plates…spaced armor. ;)

JJR

[thomas7g]

Where in G80 was that?

[Muffit]

Welcome DamoclesX ;)

[justjackrandom]

....ummm I'll have to watch G-80 again :eek:

I meant (in case it was mis-understood) that the Vipers in G-80 were referred to as Mk II's and the Mk II-A thing was heard AWAY from the show.

I am not a fan of G-80, and haven't watched a single ep since it met its timely demise. However, I did watch it at the time, and have a vague memory of Kent McCord explaining to someone about the II and II-A, …maybe Robyn Douglass.

JJR

[gmd3d]

Great work on that Viper, Can't wait to see the finished project.

[DamoclesX]

Thanks guys,

final pics are here,

http://members.shaw.ca/DamoclesX/Preview.jpg
http://members.shaw.ca/DamoclesX/prev33.jpg


its just waiting for anything I might have to change for the engine


on another subject, a dood sent me this

http://img131.exs.cx/img131/6531/scarletviper.jpg

Is that a cannon viper and could it / where would it, fit in.

I kind of like the design.

I want to include as many as possible.. the game will "start" before the war.. a bit before the war, so you will get to see the sites and stuff(and I need to find out exactly WHY they had such a huge fleet.. what did the colonials fight in their "spare" time)

This site owns:)

[gmd3d]

To my understanding it not cannon , but a possiable one a could have been Richard Hatch used it in one of his books . and the second coming trailer
Its design was updated (after 20 yahrens) by Steve Parady into the Scarlet-Class Viper, Mark II.
more informed minds can give you more info hope this helps :thumbsup:

http://www.curemode.com/battlestar/bgintsp.htm

[thomas7g]

Its the one Richard Hatch commisioned for the Battlestar Second Coming Trailer. Its also I heard in his books. There is no official publically released version. It might have been in the Battlestar revival had `bg not been ensnagled in the legal disputes between Larson and Universal.

Tunning a quick google query give you these hits:
http://www.starshipmodeler.com/other/sb_scarlet.htm
http://bridgecommander.filefront.com/file/Battlestar_Galactica_Viper_and_Scarlet;19439
http://www.b5tech.net/art/bsg/bsgimages.htm
http://users.sisna.com/roguewing1/schematics/galactica/sv.html
http://battlestarfanclub.com/battlestar/cons/gmpic31.jpg

I hope this helps.

:)

[DamoclesX]

Thanks guys


I got caught up in some commercial work, I"m gonna be busy until probably the end of the year,however I fully intend to finish all the battlestar ships, and any other ships.

If you want feel free to post links,pics,designs, anything, when it get time again I will hit them.

We are looking at feb-march for a timeframe when it will be possible to start thinking of a release, I figure we will need a good month with the new engine to get everything figured out and balanced.

If its a lot of work, then we will do just a few ships and get them out so people can have something to play with.

If I get anything done in my spare time I will post it.

Just a general update
Viper-Done
Galactica- Modeled
Cylon - Modeled
Heavy Mover - Modeled
Base Star - 50% modeled

[thomas7g]

I'll be waiting in eager anticipation!

[DamoclesX]

Dedicated forums for the mod have been setup here

Actually this is the first place I posted this site, new community site for starshatter, but its a great place if you want to post ANYTHING about the project to help out, general suggestions, or pics of ships you would like to see

http://mariopaz.com/Core/index.php

2 more weeks and I"ll be free again to hit the models hardcore again.

[DamoclesX]

I'm using a very close copy of the original MK2 for the MK1 in the project, I thought about making somethign new, or pulling a fan design, but the fan designs will get a lot of homadge in this mod anyways, so I figured I should do this.

The reasons are simple, we saw an old cylon in the show, and I belive we saw on old model of a basestar and raider, unless I didnt see it right, so in theory, the mk2 should be an old mk2, mk1, or some older varient.

So here she is, all decked out and ready for the engine.

http://members.shaw.ca/DamoclesX/BattleStar/MK1/1.jpg

http://members.shaw.ca/DamoclesX/BattleStar/MK1/3.jpg

http://members.shaw.ca/DamoclesX/BattleStar/MK1/4.jpg

Next up is the MK7, after that, I would ask that anybody who has made fan designs, or know of them, point me to the info, or post on the Starshatter Central forums

Here
http://starshattercentral.com/Core/

I will be doing most of not all of them, hey, look at it this way, at least you get to play with your design:)

Same goes for cap ships, I found a few, using the parts from the new battlestar I could make them.. I did debate doing the old battlestar to, truth is, I dont want to unless it can be fit into the way of things, the new battlestar is a lot of freaking work, and the old one would be even MORE texture work.

[Haveke]

Ah okay,

I gotta ask, whats with the hull armor on the new battlestar?!?! why are massive areas of the ship lacking hull armor and showing bulkheads while others only have it in a few places, are all the battlestars like this? or is this one a super junker for some reason.

Maby, once this is flying, I"ll throw in the old show galactica and viper... as older models.. it seems to me thats what this show seems to imply, since it showed the old cylon in the first episode at that space station.


We Have Learned from the Miniseries that the Galactia is at least 50 years Old...

She is a Museum in Space... with ONLY 1 Working Landing Bay... Remember the Other Has been turned into a Display for the Older Vipers ETC...

I would estimate that the Galactia ONLY has 60% of its Hull Armor... She was able to Hold at Bay... 2 Cylon Basestars & Took a Direct Hit from a Cylon Nuke to the Only functioning Landing Bay, with only a Fire in a Contained Area of the Ship...

Battlestars are Built to withstand a Major Pounding... Unless you count the way the Cylons were able to Turn off the Networked Computer Systems of the rest of the Colonial Fleet...

The Galactia may be old, and may not be the best looking ship in service... just imagine what they could do if they were able to Completely Replace the Missing Hull Armor & Restore the Other Landing Bay back to working Condition...

The Galactia was being Retired from service... I would guess the Colonials thought
the Cylon threat was at a stalemate, hence the phase out of the Old Ships Like Galactia...

Mankind was Wrong!!

The Galactia Survived Because their Computers weren't Networked... There is an Old Phrase... "They don't make 'em like that anymore"...

Adama Will Find a Way to Lead His People to Safety Somehow...

Haveke

:bg04:

[DamoclesX]

First pics are here

http://starshattercentral.com/Core/

these are still using the dx7 engine, the dx9 engine is comming in feb

[braxiss]

nice work :thumbsup: :salute:

[thomas7g]

That looks REALLY nice!

:D

[repcisg]

Good work!

[DamoclesX]

A few more updates, including the first heavy cruiser

http://starshattercentral.com/Core/modules/coppermine/albums/userpics/10002/1.jpg

Non canon of course, but I"m using these concepts to build up to doing the core ships, I"ll do a few more colonial ships over the weekend, build up some experience and such before I hit the big guy

[repcisg]

Very nice work.