IronDuke's Space Game

I like the idea. My fav mods were always those eliete and unleashed ones that made the NPC as well equiped as the player. I would do a lot of my own editing to them and ultimately make the game too unstable to play lol.

It always seemed that the game was so close to being perfect. like the systems were built correctly, but the designers just input the wrong values, in terms of making the traffic/cargo make more sence yadda yadda.

My fav was always the ifleet one where you could pirate actual ships and role with your own fleet compositions. it gave meaning to some of those cool civilian ships you saw flying around out there, making them troop transports or something for your marines

Some good news: I will soon be getting a new computer, with an SSD, so all my flaky hard drive problems will be things of the past, and I may finally be able to do screen capture videos without losing frames. As soon as I can, I'll take a video of the Phoenix, first ship model in game (untextured though,) and very similar to the Dreadnaught Corvette. The Phoenix even has a command section, accomodation modules (4! ), and rear-firing weapons with equal power to the forward firing ones. The only thing it has that the Dreadnaught doesn't is a small fighter bay, since it can't carry turret fighters. Yes I'm putting t-fighters in my space game - they're too cool and useful to pass up.
The computer I work on is not the same one as the one I post on (working PC south bridge dead, as mentioned before, so no internet,) so I can't post screenshots of the ship today, but they are coming, just as soon as I can get them.
Patience, pirates! Thy splendid space ship shall reach thee soon!

--IronDuke

Here they are: screenshots from in Unity, and a Notepad file with an un-short ship description I whipped up. I basically sat down, typed for an hour and a half, and didn't even bother doing a spell check, so apologies in advance if I misspelled something.
This ship model is very preliminary: the wings are likely to change, becoming tapered toward the ends, the poly count is way too low, and there is a startling absence of little details, probably because it's untextured. That will of course change after the modelling is done.
I have already gotten a Newtonian flight model working, with full control of all six degrees of freedom, and also a halt autopilot, because manually bringing the ship to a perfect halt is darn near impossible.
The comsec is currently merely a model, with no special effects, and I didn't even finish preliminary modelling of its rear. (Which is fine, because you can't see it anyway if it's docked. Silly me, I went and undocked it anyway so you can see how very flat the rear is. )
Enjoy!

--IronDuke

P.S. New computer parts purchased from Newegg, so now I just have to put them together and get them working. May take a while.

(Edited to add cheerfulness)

Holy smokes, you call that a corvette? I call it a gunship, that thing looks tough.
I love the manuvering thrusters, are those partical systems?

I cheated with my physics and used the ridigbody drag and angular drag to stop the ship from moving. Its like the "flight assist" mode and you can toggle it on and off if you want to go spinning out of control like in EOC

Same thing with the auto pilots, disabling the physics seems to be how they did it, because whenever you get hit while on autopilot your ship doesnt list as if it was being effected by physics.

Anywho, nice work. this seems to be a very exciting time for EOC i'm glad I got back into it when I did

The maneuvering thrusters are the jet engine afterburner that comes with the Unity standard assets, but the bigger thrusters - the drive - that's a somewhat modified version. They are indeed particle systems, which is one of my favorite things to play with. I was over the roof ecstatic when I first got Unity and took one look at Shuriken. :lol:
My physics use the Rigidbody.AddForceAtPosition function, allowing for forces to be applied at the actual thruster locations. This means that if you lose a thruster, your flight model will go goofy. In EoC, they simply set velocity values, so thruster system damage was not nearly so cool. My autopilot simply feeds input values to the thruster the same exact way the player does, so lovely physics all around.
Because it's in space, there is no drag at all. If you turn the ship a little, it'll continue turning until you fire the thruster in the opposite direction. But that will be with flight assist off. Flight assist is actually next on my list for coding, and orbital mechanics are right after that.
Incidentally, the completely physical flight model means that you will experience forces on your ship when firing weapons. Example: you've got twin heavy plasma cannons on the right side. Fire them, and your ship will start to turn to the right. I'm planning on programming a very sophisticated flight assist that will counteract weapons recoil, give the controls a little help to make stopping with the target in the dead center of the reticle easier, automatically weaken certain thrusters to compensate for damaged ones to ensure smooth control, and - this is my favorite - with the option turned on, it will direct the lateral thruster to help with maneuvering, and vice-versa, provided those thrusters aren't doing anything in the first place. Boy, will that give one an unexpected maneuverability and acceleration boost!

--IronDuke

P.S. Wait until you see a real gunship! :evil:

This sounds great! Has any additional progress been made?