X3 - Oblivion [Planetary Flight demo]

[wesley32]

Hello everyone,

I'm currently in the process of creating a whole new plot for X3 Albion Prelude furthering the story of Julian Brennan after the events of X3 Reunion. The plot will be part of a mod including features seen in the following video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsOjPxX03SY

Please note this is still in early testing, however I've been able to create a lot more than what you see in the video (landscapes/cities etc.). Expect more videos over the coming weeks.

Cheers,
Wes

[Joubarbe]

Nice !

[KongDeluxe]

looks awesome!

[ALien8ed]

That looks fantastic. Absolutely love the look of the sector with all the traffic flowing threw it, just beautiful.

Will definately be keeping an eye on this and i look forward to future updates...

[All_Names_Already_Taken]

Where you got that awesome cockpit??? Must... have.... this.... now!!!....

[feygan]

I'll be honest and say I'm not a fan of this at the present stage. I saw instantly how you were going to get around the problem of planets once I saw the TOA, and it is a neat solution.

For me the issue is immersion, when you add something like planetary flight it seems that the only real reason for this is too increase the immersion level of the game. That itself is a great idea, but this mod has the opposite effect on me. The way the scenery is done is amazing and really does give you the impression of flying in low atmosphere. But then you have big hunks of space station seemingly just floating there, why are they not dropping out of the sky like stones? This is clearly too close to the planet to argue that gravity is not strong enough at this distance otherwise why does it look like a high flying plane trip? To then try to argue that they perhaps have some form of thruster to remain aloft also fails, as this would then mean in space they would be able to reposition themselves anywhere.

I think the only way you could do this and not kill immersion were to try something similar to the planet mission in x3 reunion. You could make some objects meant to be buildings that are nothing but stuff that you can bash into and perhaps fiddle around with how the large ships could land so it seems like they are landing but really just docking. Smaller ships I guess could just dock to a docking bay that is housed in a larger model that appears to be a spaceport etc.

[Shomey]

I was wondering why this was never done before but even after a game been out for a long time mods come out that impress a lot.

I`m no X3 modder so maybe it is stupid but, can`t you create an object, like a station which is the actual planet. Landing pads could be normal docking spots. then you can trow in some buildings and such.

A game like Elite has some nice docking going on(never played tho). Would also be sweet if you could fly into a station manually and somewhere inside there are docking stations.

Would be a some sweet immersion. Now its just autopilot and SETA, which kinda kills the nice views.

[All_Names_Already_Taken]

I was wondering why this was never done before but even after a game been out for a long time mods come out that impress a lot.

I`m no X3 modder so maybe it is stupid but, can`t you create an object, like a station which is the actual planet. Landing pads could be normal docking spots. then you can trow in some buildings and such.

A game like Elite has some nice docking going on(never played tho). Would also be sweet if you could fly into a station manually and somewhere inside there are docking stations.

Would be a some sweet immersion. Now its just autopilot and SETA, which kinda kills the nice views.

X2 had pretty much exactly what elite has, and... well, after few hundreds manual landings and navigating stations pretty much repetetive interiors I was glad that those scenes were skippable.
X3 is an older game, so it is out of question of recreating an interior of same eyecandy level of new elite, which probably the only thing that makes manual landings there so great. And even then, I imagine that after few hundreds of manual landing on same stations in elite you would eventually want to skip them too. So all in all, indoor station navigation seems like too much work for something that will be very shortlived in every players game. Not to mention that it will be not anywhere near as impressive as in elite due to X3 age.

Also, nobody forces you to use SETA if you dont like it, its basically a legalised time compression cheat and nothing else.

[wesley32]

I'll be honest and say I'm not a fan of this at the present stage. I saw instantly how you were going to get around the problem of planets once I saw the TOA, and it is a neat solution.

For me the issue is immersion, when you add something like planetary flight it seems that the only real reason for this is too increase the immersion level of the game. That itself is a great idea, but this mod has the opposite effect on me. The way the scenery is done is amazing and really does give you the impression of flying in low atmosphere. But then you have big hunks of space station seemingly just floating there, why are they not dropping out of the sky like stones? This is clearly too close to the planet to argue that gravity is not strong enough at this distance otherwise why does it look like a high flying plane trip? To then try to argue that they perhaps have some form of thruster to remain aloft also fails, as this would then mean in space they would be able to reposition themselves anywhere.

I think the only way you could do this and not kill immersion were to try something similar to the planet mission in x3 reunion. You could make some objects meant to be buildings that are nothing but stuff that you can bash into and perhaps fiddle around with how the large ships could land so it seems like they are landing but really just docking. Smaller ships I guess could just dock to a docking bay that is housed in a larger model that appears to be a spaceport etc.

I'm in the process of creating terrains and ground spaceports as you can read in my original post. The spacestations you see were added for the sake of making a nice looking video. Please bare with me.

Also, the TOA's will be replaced with custom modelled gates made for transporting ships up and down planet atmospheres.

[All_Names_Already_Taken]

I'll be honest and say I'm not a fan of this at the present stage. I saw instantly how you were going to get around the problem of planets once I saw the TOA, and it is a neat solution.

For me the issue is immersion, when you add something like planetary flight it seems that the only real reason for this is too increase the immersion level of the game. That itself is a great idea, but this mod has the opposite effect on me. The way the scenery is done is amazing and really does give you the impression of flying in low atmosphere. But then you have big hunks of space station seemingly just floating there, why are they not dropping out of the sky like stones? This is clearly too close to the planet to argue that gravity is not strong enough at this distance otherwise why does it look like a high flying plane trip? To then try to argue that they perhaps have some form of thruster to remain aloft also fails, as this would then mean in space they would be able to reposition themselves anywhere.

I think the only way you could do this and not kill immersion were to try something similar to the planet mission in x3 reunion. You could make some objects meant to be buildings that are nothing but stuff that you can bash into and perhaps fiddle around with how the large ships could land so it seems like they are landing but really just docking. Smaller ships I guess could just dock to a docking bay that is housed in a larger model that appears to be a spaceport etc.

I'm in the process of creating terrains and ground spaceports as you can read in my original post. The spacestations you see were added for the sake of making a nice looking video. Please bare with me.

Also, the TOA's will be replaced with custom modelled gates made for transporting ships up and down planet atmospheres.

Keep doing whatever you doing if you enjoy it and dont let other ppl to discourage you. After all you not doing it for them, and the rest is a matter of personal taste. I for once looking foward to what you will end up with.

Have a suggestion about mechanic and suspension of disbelief:
Make "planet area" basically as a huge inside of a box-like station, limiting the players movement from below and all sides, representing inner spaceport infrastructure. Then you can make entire "sky" area work as one huge jump gate, making it so that as soon ship flies out of "spaceport" it will be "teleported" into space.

[UniTrader]

I was wondering why this was never done before but even after a game been out for a long time mods come out that impress a lot.

I`m no X3 modder so maybe it is stupid but, can`t you create an object, like a station which is the actual planet. Landing pads could be normal docking spots. then you can trow in some buildings and such.

Technical limitation: the Safety Distance for all Ships depends on the Object Size they try to avoid. if you create a Planet-Sized Station the Ships would stay away from it thousands of kilometers. thats also the reason why the Docking Path of Terran Stations is so long compared to the commonwealth Stations - they are (too) huge (Docking Path is as long as it needs to be outside the avoidance area).
And if you make diffrent Objects for Station and Docking Ports the Ships wont get near enough to the approaching Pos of the Landing Pads because they will always try to Avoid the Station Object

[X2-Illuminatus]

I was wondering why this was never done before but even after a game been out for a long time mods come out that impress a lot.

It has been done before. J.L. did something like that in his Völkership mod for X3R (and probably also X3TC/AP).

[DrBullwinkle]

J.L. did something like that in his Völkership mod

I would *love* to have a Volkswagen ship for X3!

• (I dunno whether that is as funny in German as it is in English.)
  
  (However, it is probably funnier in my head than anywhere else.)

Nice work, wesley32.

[Moonrat]

Nice!

[KongDeluxe]

So any progress wesley32?

[shameless creature]

Totally OT: What is the name of the song in the video?

[wesley32]

Hey guys,

I got caught up with RL stuff so hadn't done much in the past months. Started working on my project again. The whole new storyline is way too much for me to create, I'm focussing on new sectors for now.

Here's some eyecandy in the meantime.. enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4XPoWY ... e=youtu.be

It's all still early WIP as you can see but it shows great potential.

[Cedric_FP]

I love the way it looks, and those lines of traffic gave me some serious fifth element vibes.

Fantastic work, wesley.

[wesley32]

And another shot near the ground:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufVvJNkylZ4

expect to see ground bases in the next vid!

[enenra]

Ok, some questions if you don't mind.

1. How are you intending to solve the issue with autopilot / NPC ships? With such a large object in the sector, I'd expect it to go completely crazy.

2. Can you collide with the ground?

3. How do you solve the issue of the area where your ground model ends? After all it can't go on forever.


Some ideas regarding this whole thing:

Divide the planet body into many smaller ones and then place them together by script / MD. If you standardize sizes and transitions of these tiles, it would even allow for procedural generation of a planetary surface. Fiddly, but possible.

That might also allow for the surface to technically go on endlessly as you could just spawn them in around objects as you go. But again, that would be a huge undertaking code-wise.

Regardless of whether you have tiles or not, placing fake asteroids on the surface / as tiles would allow you to then replace them with "buildings" aka mines. The player could thus choose from several spots on the surface for building a base.

All of that is highly theoretical though and depending on the implementation the performance impact could be huge.

Oh, also, those traffic texture animations from the Torus - what if players fly up to them? Or are they placed in the background? That would look pretty weird too, though, since they'd always be the same distance away.