One of the changes to Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion is a significant update of the graphics system. This is done so that Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion remains state of the art visually.
Example:
BEFORE:
and…
AFTER:
And pleeeeaasee let the z position of the stars vary a bit in rebellion. It's not nice for flat ships that light is always coming at a 90 degree angle.
One of the things people often forget is that in Sins, you're often dealing with thousands upon thousands of ships. That's why you won't see things like moving turrets. If this were a game with only a few dozen units that sort of thing makes sense. But the biggest appeal of Sins, IMO, is the scale of it.
Thousands?
I think that one would be hard-pressed to find a game with 1 or more thousand ships in-game at once...
I believe that it would MINI-DUMP before you get there...
Not true. In SP, it happens far more often than MP. My brother, for example, allowed other players to have a field day with pirates, thus resulting in a massive number returning to their home base. The game end numbers that he had to face were 3,500 ships, 500 of which were capital vessels. This is with the DS mod, btw.
The map had 5 systems and 80 planets. Over 2 million credits in total were paid to the pirates.
https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/165996
That was back in beta.
Totaly possible in any normal game.
Ok you have your fleet, errr lets say thats 150ish frigs,crusers, and caps. Times that by 10....there over a thousand there.
Now Count each trade port spawning ships and refineries....
Dont forget pirates....
Ah and SC...each squad has more than one ship....Lets take Advent...50 squads x 9= 450 ships.
Oh construction ships...
And I'd throw in all the various bits of space debris flying around.
FPS games alone withh have millions of polys on a given level. So a game where things float in the void? Unless the ships are insanely detailed, you can do it.
I don't always play strategy games, but when I do, I prefer Sins of a Solar Empire.
In regards to the question about lighting and if we changed the data maps and what not: No, we didn't go crazy changing how the maps work. That would have been too time intensive. What we've done is update the shader system code quite a lot in order to bring out the details more and added a shadow system. Also, whereas in Trinity the light was largely from ambient and the star, in Rebellion it's pretty much all from the star and the ship's illumination map.
That's the layman's version; I'll leave details to the actual artists.
Skyrim incorporated some old Oblivion mods into it, I see no reason why Rebellion couldn't take the best from some of the mods, as a win, win for the community. We get more content, you don't have massive amounts of time.......
At the very least..
some new planets.
new skyboxes.
new planet discovery's.
I wonder what would this look like if you add the graphics mod especially the particles.
Every fighter is a ship that is tracked. Every construction ship is a ship. Etc. These are all tracked in real time.
Does anyone else notice the only thing that changes is the capital ship?
Maybe because capitalships and the skybox is the only thing in that picture?
The new skyboxes aren't in the build in question.
How interesting......
No i mean that the thing in the background dosen't change and niether does that skyboxes
I'm not complaining i just found that interesting
The skybox is not affected partially cause the matter is so far off that it wouldn't make sense. And there's no movement to make it count visually. The nose of the cap in the upper right is different, but it's at an angle where it's hard to notice. Put them side to side and look again.
Why are you people giving ships such omgwhatthehellhowawesomeisthat!! graphics if you focus on the scale? When there are "thousands upon thousands" of ships, nobody is going to see a single percent of the graphical oomph you're throwing into this game anyway.
Let's face it, some of us (many of us I suppose), sometimes ENJOY closing up on the damn ships and seeing how they pew-pew stuff. The full extent of the graphical awesomeness is only visible up close, so you definitely expected people to do that sometimes. On the other hand, the game already has methods to limit the amount of graphics depending on the distance. For example, when you zoom out far enough, the ship becomes a 2d icon.
Tell me please, in full honesty: Is it REALLY IMPOSSIBLE to add moving turrets, for example if you zoom very, very close?
I really don't care if my Garda frig has moving turrets when it's just a little dot on the screen or a 2d icon, so the turret may (should) not even be rendered then. Only when I'm really up close should they become visible.Hell, the immobile turrets that are now can even be removed completely from unit models and replaced with meshes/particle effects/whatever it's called, which are only rendered when the player is looking at the ship from a very small distance. Like rendering a piece of debris that is only visible at a very close range and that just happens to look like a turret facing in the proper direction.
TLDR: In short, I do not believe that it's not doable. I think it can be done. It's just that Ironclad CBA to do it. And you know what? It's okay. I can really believe that you do not have enough funds, time or men to do it. It's really okay.
Just please stop hiding behind "it can't be done" or "it's nonsense due to <reasons>", because many players would really REALLY enjoy seeing that their ships are not flying lego bricks. That's how they look now when you zoom in, flying bricks. Nicely detailed flying bricks.All you have to do is say "sorry guys, moving turrets won't happen because we don't have time to remake all models for them; it would require way more work than it's worth and there are a hundred other things we should spend our time on, balance and bug-fixing among them". That's a bloody good argument right there and we will take it. Just be honest.
Yes, turret tracking target is possible but it is not easy...
First, it can only work if the turret is included in the firing particle effect... so, you are right, all model need to be remake... turret need to be remake and be included in new firing particle effect via calling of fx files...
Will only work good with pop-up turret... short animation who rise the gun on the deck, gun firing a few time, down in the deck... some complex timing calculation need to be made because you don't wish a yo-yo gun who go up and down...
The point is that a lot of thing say to be "impossible" with sins is in fact possible by using tip and trick... so, i understand why Stardock say it is "impossible"... in fact, they mean that it is not practicable... best for them to just listen and remember it for when they start work on a sins 2 engine... by example if the sins II engine include a basic bones system, it can resolve a lot of thing... tracking turret become simply a process of rotating a bone... joint between bones can have a min/max values... when apply to a turret, it mean variable angle of fire... finish the +- 90 degrees... it will become possible to put value where turret don't shoot in his own ship structure... model animation become more easy that using the actual particle effect... something like a bones system is more useful that use some tip and trick who ask a lot of work... but can only be implemented on a new engine...
Yes, I've noticed that Homeworld does a fair job of simplifying the models as you zoom out, including the appearance of the turrets snapping into place, although it is obviously a model replacement with static turrets. I do agree that it's impractical, especially with the current engine. I mean, construction isn't even a fluid process. After it goes through the animation of making the figure opaque, it deletes one component and places a new one outside the shipyard. That's all fine and good, but N3rull is right in that we get it and are fine with being told the truth. After all, we both appreciate not being patronized and have a lot of modders that can tell you exactly how much of a pain it really is.
Build effects can be messed with quite easily, as I've done it. Spawning parts and pieces that assemble themselves in a gantry looks phenomenal (granted that all of your ships HAVE to look similar and have identical build times.), all you have to do is put the actual frigate construction point somewhere inside of the mesh. ( cheating)
I have also tried to create 'turrets' with particle effects...
It don't work, so stop saying that it does...
If turrets are something that mean something (like aiming) it means that there needs to be a lot more care about how firing works, even if they're off screen.
Missiles and beams come out of ships in ways that are almost completely disconnected from the graphics. If you added turrets and such, you'd need to take great care of the instances when the weapons could realistically fire (i.e. you can't have turrets that shoot say at a right angle).
It's not a graphical limitation, it's a CPU one.
This statement does resonate with the community to an extent. I know that some community suggestions have made it into Trinity / Diplomacy, one of which being the star and planet shrinkage when zoomed out to reduce clutter on multiple star maps (thanks for looking into this on your free time Blair!). Could we get a glimpse of what might have been included from the community into Rebellion or might be slated for release via a content patch?
Well, I accept that you do not have the time nor the manpower to address this, but the CPU power IS there. We have quad/hexa/octo-cores by now and more than enough cpu power to address this for a limited amount of turrets per (say Capital)ships I believe. Perhaps not for frigates and certainly not for fighters, but for capitalships it should suffice.
And thanks for hearing us out!
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