Bigger spaceships!

[Gambler Z Gluck]

This is screenshot of my first capture of Orion. http://token.by.ru/orion/orion.jpg
It shows average distance between TFs in combat, which is even bigger for IF and Carriers. It also shows, that there is no way to fight with maximum zoom or even with half-zoom. You see these huge 9-pixel dots? They are Titans. QSI, please make ships at least visible. This can’t be difficult to fix.

[Okrahl]

And make it a little bit faster.
this one is a resourcekiller and what it produces is 10 grey pixels throwing red pixel on 15 brown pixels witch fire white pixels with long gray tails in return

[richieelias]

There is a well known method of making the ships larger in the fan mod forum. Just do a search for "larger ships" or something close. It is very easy to do (getting the ships to be bigger I mean).

[S1.Genocide]

Jazkals Hi Res Shipmod or search for grymor.

[Saitam39]

the graphics for bigger ships are right there in the out-of-the-box install

you just have to extract them from the archive and re-name them so that it thinks its still using the small ships

as previously stated, the full instructions can be found in the mod forum

be warned, the improvement is minimal and the resource usage goes up dramatically

i still can't believe they went with Voxels on this

yet another nail in the coffin of *that* technology

[Emrys]

I don't think the problem is necessarily the use of Voxels. The combat would still be some single pixel grey dots firing at some red dots even if they were nicely rendered and dynamically lighted polygonic single pixel dots.

The problem is simply one of scale. The ranges at which ships engage are vastly too large given the size of the ship graphics.

Obviously this gives a more 'realistic' view of combat, but unfortunately it is useless from a gameplay perspective, since zoomed out far enough to see both task forces at typical engagement ranges your ships look tiny.

I wonder if ALL the range data is externalised (i.e. nothing hard coded.) If so, perhaps it would be worth modding all the range data in the game to be ten times smaller, so that the engagement ranges would be ten times smaller, so you could use ten times more zoom, so ships would cover 100 times larger areas on the screen, so you'd get 10 grey 100pixel sized ships throwing red missiles at 15 brown 100pixel ships which fire white fighters in return...

Hmmm, I might just try that when I get home...

[Patton1942]

Originally posted by Saitam39
the graphics for bigger ships are right there in the out-of-the-box install

you just have to extract them from the archive and re-name them so that it thinks its still using the small ships

as previously stated, the full instructions can be found in the mod forum

be warned, the improvement is minimal and the resource usage goes up dramatically

i still can't believe they went with Voxels on this

yet another nail in the coffin of *that* technology

Link? Thread title for search? Thread starter for search? Anything? Please?
Thank you.

[Orionator]

My request would actually be the opposite, that I be allowed to zoom ALL THE WAY OUT, that is, zoom out far enough to see the WHOLE AREA, and reduce all the TF's to whatever pixel-size is necessary to do so.

Do I really want to be "zoomed in" when I'm struggling desperately to find which direction the enemy fleet is in? No way! I want to know, at a glance, where my forces are, where any orbital bodies are, and of course where the enemy fleet is.

Once the battle starts, yeah, by all means zoom in. But when the battle is just starting I'd rather have the ability to zoom out more.

It would also be nice if the sensitivity of the mouse wheel were reduced; my map seems to have 2 zoom settings, all the way in and all the way out, because my mouse wheel has detents in it and one "quantum" of mouse wheel spin causes a massive input. I think I might be able to change that in the mouse driver, though.

As an aside, never buy a mouse with detents in the wheel. Buy one with a wheel that provides even, firm resistance instead, so you get finer control over wheel movement without accidentally moving the wheel by resting your finger on it. (Do they make such a thing?)

[moriarty]

Orionator: It is possible to zoom in/out via the keyboard in combat (rather than using the mouse). It's much smoother (i have the mouse scroll wheel problem too).

I can't recall what the keyboard shortcuts are though. I think crtl -Up/Down or shift or something like that...

[Iskabis]

same as on the galaxy map: '-' and '='. (i suppose on the numpad it might be - and +, but i dunno)

-rhyssan

[richieelias]

There is absolutely no reason to download the massive larger ship mod. Here is how to do it yourself.

HOW TO GET THE LARGER SHIP/FIGHTER/MISSILE GRAPHICS:
First unzip the objects.mob file using whatever standard app you use to open .zip files. The objects.mob file is located in your moo3/gamedatasets/classic_01/gameassets/common folder. Extract all of the *50.vsx files and change 50 to 25 on all of them. DO NOT ADD THEM BACK INTO THE OBJECTS.MOB!!! That's all there is to it.
If you do this, then I hope you have a reasonably fast computer, or you like slide shows.

Hope this helps.

Also, everybody keeps blaming voxels for the slowdown during large ship battles, and they seem to think that polygons are the answer. Wrong. A polygonal model with the same detail as the current ships would be even more memory intensive (though it would be much crisper, and much easier to mod). The real reason for the massive slowdown is the lack of LOD (Level Of Detail, or less complex models for more distant things). You're getting the exact same amount of detail wether you're zoomed all the way out as when you're zoomed all the way in. An introduction of LOD into the combat engine would do wonders to the smoothness of large scale combat.

[Iskabis]

i don't know anything about modern graphics models or image formats. would it be possible to mod the images to add the LOD, or is that something that the game has to incorporate in the code? (i mean, does the format the ship images come in allow for different LOD information within just the graphic file? and something similar for less complex models depending on z values?)

just curious...
-rhyssan

[Gambler Z Gluck]

Thanks for the info about ship models replacements.

yet another nail in the coffin of *that* technology
When used properly, voxels rule. Have you ever played BG1, BG2, P:T, IWD?

[richieelias]

@Iskabis: I wouldnt know where to begin as far as incorporating an LOD system into MOO3, or if it is even possible. If theres anyone out there who has any ideas on how to do it, I'm sure everyone would love to hear it.

Or maybe if everybody begs hard enough, you could get the dev's to incorporate it in a future patch, but seeing as how it really isnt a game killer, then it would probably be a while before it happened (if at all).

[Iskabis]

ok - you seemed to know a bit about it, and i just wondered if it were a code thing or an image file format thing...

thanks :)
-rhyssan

[Phezzan]

Originally posted by Orionator
It would also be nice if the sensitivity of the mouse wheel were reduced; my map seems to have 2 zoom settings, all the way in and all the way out, because my mouse wheel has detents in it and one "quantum" of mouse wheel spin causes a massive input. I think I might be able to change that in the mouse driver, though.

As an aside, never buy a mouse with detents in the wheel. Buy one with a wheel that provides even, firm resistance instead, so you get finer control over wheel movement without accidentally moving the wheel by resting your finger on it. (Do they make such a thing?)
My mouse has no such problem - I believe settings is the answer. I think there is a bug in combat zoom, if I turn off the grid, I have instant massive zoom, otherwise works ok.

Check out moo3prefs.ini
Inside is a setting for the wheel. Beware - it changes all uses of the mouse wheel in the game, including scrolling text.

I hate smooth mouse wheels.

Phez

[Phezzan]

Originally posted by Emrys
I don't think the problem is necessarily the use of Voxels. The combat would still be some single pixel grey dots firing at some red dots even if they were nicely rendered and dynamically lighted polygonic single pixel dots.
I don't know much about voxels - but I do know my GF3 wont accelerate them.

The problem is simply one of scale. The ranges at which ships engage are vastly too large given the size of the ship graphics.
yeah - but it 'coulda shoulda' been done better. Higher resolution would help too, how about 1024x768? Its a very good standard res, and would solve other problems too.


I wonder if ALL the range data is externalised (i.e. nothing hard coded.) If so, perhaps it would be worth modding all the range data in the game to be ten times smaller, so that the engagement ranges would be ten times smaller, so you could use ten times more zoom, so ships would cover 100 times larger areas on the screen, so you'd get 10 grey 100pixel sized ships throwing red missiles at 15 brown 100pixel ships which fire white fighters in return...

Hmmm, I might just try that when I get home...
Good luck - missle and fighter speeds aren't moddable last I checked, also you might have problems with the radius of a task force.

Phez