The Tie Bomber

It doesn't have gun proturbances (barrels, pipes or whatever) on the front where the gun01 and gun02 nulls are. Do they come later as part of the textures?

Yes. All the Ties have their hull mounted guns as part of the texture only.

I'm not too sure about the nulls on the right side (seen from the front). What do you call the bent up thingy that looks like an upside down periscope that's sticking out the bottom? Is that where the bomb_rack null is or is that the torpedo_tube? Is there a null on that object at all?

The thing sticking out the bottom is where the "bombs" came out in the movie. The opening in the bomb storage hull, with the pointy fork-like protrusions, seemed like a logical place for the torpedoes to come out. And there's no info on their actual function, so I thought it was as good a place as any.

The other "Model Update" package with the LOD and texture changes hasn't come through yet. Is that still work in progress?

Yes, it took me all week. Almost everything for the avatars is new now. And should work/look better. I'm on the very last thing as I type this, the null setup for the Star Destroyer. So you'll get it today. Well. . .you'll probably have to download it.

MajorTom, did you say you had some kind of special plans for the Star Destroyer main cannons? I was planning on setting up nulls that would accomodate the large blocky, almost square-shaped, turrets that hang upsidedown on the EoC Old Destroyer. These most closely approximate the shape of the SD's main guns. Is this a problem?

Here's a pic of the main guns, near the middle at right. Just below the "buiding" structures on the main hull. If you have a better idea for a gun avatar, I'm open to suggestions.
www.studioscale.com/images/reference/Sta...Destroyer_06_jpg.jpg

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Well, I've just sent the big update off to MajorTom. Among the improvements are:

• More efficent meshes, with absolutely no more wasted polys
• Millennium Falcon now has some temporary textures and cool lights
• Animation for the B-Wing! (finally, right?)
• More logical texture sizes. Reduced the sizes but kept the beauty
• The full setup for the Star Destroyer (now we can actually get it in-game and working)
• No reduced poly models for the second LOD. Fighters will look better for longer.
• Finally added the missing rear window/hatch to the Tie textures

btw - The Tie Fighter was the right size after all. I was looking at an old 3dsMax model that for some reason wasn't sized right.

I'll try to wrap up the B-Wing's textures and get started on a Mon Cal carrier this weekend. But there should be enough to work with there for a little while.

On another note:
Nobody ever complained (or probably even noticed), but the Tie aren't actually the right color. They should be slightly tinted to be more bluish grey. It's easy to change, I don't know why I didn't do it to begin with. That will be in the next update.

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Thanks, I've got the DL, and I'll put everything together and get it working as soon as I can.

I didn't have any plans for the guns on the SD as far as models go, just thier functionality. IIRC, I did note that when the SD (or any other model) is used as a static object of type T_Gunstar in the MP game the AI is only capable of fireing one of the guns.

As a player ship (or botship) it can of course fire them all. However, as we have long known, the animation of the guns tracking a target doesn't always work for all guns. No one has ever found a fix for that yet.

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I'm becoming more displeased by the minute with the look of the gun avatars on the Star Destroyer. At first I thought they were cool, but the more I look at them the more they disrupt the intended shape of the ship. It's the big main guns mostly. They're a decent shape, but they're just too damn big. Maybe we shouldn't use any avatars for the guns at all, that might be best. After all, you could never actually see the guns in the movies. It would also alleviate the slow-down. I don't know. Have a look and tell me what you think. If we weren't trying to reproduce something here, I would think that they look great. It's just that they're all wrong on that ship.

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We can make them smaller within limits. For example The "Verona" in the Epic online mod has a scaled down version.

IIRC we can take them down to 70 % of the original size without seeing gaps between the body elements and the gun barrels ect.
The "nose gun" on the Guillotine destroyer might be an option if we scale it up too

On the other hand, You're right about the preformance hit. Making a turret or any other gun without an avatar works just fine. If you put some textures on the SD model that look like the guns you would prefer, we could make stationary turrets and reduce the weapon fire arc so they would only fire within a "normal looking" arc. That would also improve preformance too; the weapons (with the corresponding bolt animation) would only fire when a target is within thier reduced arc.

Let me look at it in detail first before you do any texture work on those guns.

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