Why no model animation? Is it a planned feature?

Yes, it's intentional. No, it most likely won't be added later, because it would require re-doing all the ship meshes.

Does the engine support it, ie would mods be able to use model animation?

There is model animation with some ships - the TEC capital ship that goes broadside when it fires has arrays of gun turrets that recoil into the housing per shot. Looks extremely cool, and is wholly appropriate for TEC hardware. The Dunov? My manual is still in transit.

As far as I know, what I heard is "supported but not recommended". I'm not a modeler so someone more knowledgeable can fill you in

But yes, as Warlok pointed out, some ships are animated in minor ways.

Well if some one flys into your gravwell with 200 frigates with moving turrets its going to be a resource drain on any system i think thats why they left them out

That is not the case. HW2 had animated turrets, as well as more intensive projectile calculations - and handled hundreds of turrets just fine. In fact, even HW1 handled hundreds of turrets just fine. The CPU issue is quite simply wrong.

I dont seem to remember being able to build 200 frigates in homeworld. Homeworld limited you to how much you could build quite more than it does in this game. If you took out the ship cap in Homeworld and actually built 200 frigates, im sure you would get some major slowdown because they all would have moving turrets.

Name a frigate with a turret. Aside from the TEC scout, there aren't many. So your massive underestimates of modern PC hardware aside, it's a worthless point. I guess none of you have heard of LODing, either. And they say kids are 'imaginative'.

The examples are Dunov and Kodiak, with large obvious turrets that don't move. If they didn't want to use animation, why'd they model on turrets? I can live with the magical turning bullets at the end of immobile gun barrels (even though both HW and Freespace had moving turrets), but when ships have their firepower fixed in one arc simply because the turrets don't turn, it's bizarre. I'm just concerned that this is going to make many mods difficult to do properly due to a missing engine feature. GC2 eventually recieved model animations, and Sins has sold very well. If it's forced balance and the engine supports it, then that's fine. If the engine DOESN'T support it, that's... very strange.

It is the case when the devs deliberately wanted to create a game featuring thousands of ships in real time that would run on four- or five-year-old hardware.

Sins could no doubt have been made much more visually appealing, but that limits the audience significantly, especially given that many strategy game fans aren't quite as obsessed with cutting-edge ninja PCs as, say, FPS players.

Does that really make sense to you? You know there are graphics options, right, where you can turn the game down to run on weaker systems? Should they have left bloom lighting and high-quality textures out, because only those with a good computer can use them? Of course not. This is ignoring that it *isn't* necessarily the huge load you apparently believe it is, and that such loads can be managed in established ways like LODing, options, and various GFX functions. Even the hopelessly inefficient HW2 engine supported hundreds of fightercraft with movable turrets fine, due to really simple things like 'when you're zoomed out you don't see them'. ZOMG!

Frankly, many of the global settings (like the visible distance on fighters etc) need to be moved into options so I can turn them up. Even frigates LOD out at quite a low distance at the moment. Someone made a mod that does this I believe, and it looks much better when zoomed out.

None of this changes my question, of course. If the engine supports model animation, great stuff. Every mod that uses it will look great. If it doesn't... that's a strange oversight and I'd like to understand the dev's train of thought.

What ressource drain ??? What are you taliking about. In HW2 when you were zoomed out enough another model was taking the place. The model with fixed turrets. Besides if they didn't implement it on all ships it is more because of the deadline. Don't forget that IC and SD are just a small team not a huge one such as EA. Some sacrefice had to be made and it was made on animations.

Yeah, LoupGris, this is what I imagined. It's why I keep mentioning GC2 getting model animation later: they're a small team, but they give longterm support. I'm not sure why you mention LODing, when I've been talking about LODing for several posts now.

However, I still don't know if the engine supports animation, or how mods would use what animation functionality there is.

"Sins of a Solar Empire is powered by the Iron Engine - a brand new, advanced graphics engine from developer Ironclad Games that was built specifically for Sins. Using the latest in DirectX 9 technology, Sins is able to deliver a massive, detailed galaxy for the player to explore, expand into, exploit and ultimately conquer in real-time, all while being able to perform well on a range of systems and hardware." - Official Feature list

And to quote it some more "The only limitation is the players system" - which is a blatantly lie when you cut out basic functionality like animated turrets in the name of performance.

Also note that the claim of Homeworld breaking down when using huge numbers of units (with animations on them) is false. You can try it yourself, it's easy to mod.

A "blatent lie" is such that if they stated all of that and had hard coded some stringent settings to keep players from the near rediculous maximum size of the maps themselves. The system is completely capable of handlng rotating turrets, but it is no way a lie that they didn't impliment some rotating thingies for visual prettyness on a few ships. Cite something that says "rotating turrets" on it or quit firing off false accusations of lies. The limit is your system in the map sizes and unit caps, not because you dont get your jollies off with no rotating turrets on a few ships.

Homeworld 1 did break down with a large number of units when you switched off the unit caps, it might not have a hard limit, but it definately crashed given enough time. Quit trolling and dont be so critical of an indie game developer that released something that at the moment is far better than a lot of the top end trash on the market right now. I personally applaud Stardock for the game, yes its not perfect, but its definately got a lot of really amazing stuff in it.

MeepZero, can you show that it's capable of handling rotating turrets? This is all I really care about, since my concern is modding and not the vanilla game. I can't find any evidence or statements suggesting it can, hence this thread.

However, the 'it's not perfect but I like it' defence is irrelevant. I like it too, but if modders can't use rotating turrets, that's going to cause problems and it's really disappointing. The game definately requires some of SD's standard excellent support before it matures.

Look at the credits for Ironclad- (in the manual) only about 7 people in the company. And after 4 years of development they had to release a product. Especially since it's their first product and they have no financial capital built up from previous projects.

Because the models have 'turrets' in their design, I suspect Ironclad wanted to have moving turrets. But due to time constraints and budgetary reasons they had to leave it out of release.

For those who say moving turrets will drop cpu performance, well then make it a visual option to run it- low end user can just have static turrets. For those who have a high end beast (me, me, me!) I say, bring it on!

However, in the current scheme of things only a few units have turrets:

- Kodiak Heavy Cruiser
- Garda Flak Frigate
- Dunov Battlecruiser (?'tis true? I don't recall seeing em)

For the first two just completely redesign the model to have no turrets- DONE. They're not exatcly sexy models anyways- they're rather ugly. The Dunov model is beefy and badass- I say keep it.

Truthfully a lot of other models are f-ugly (LRM frig, Drone Frige, oh and that Advent version of seige frig, etc.) My wish is that the game eventually gets a ship model overhaul.


Ironclad, please, I'll even do the concept designs for free. That's how much I wish for it to be done!!!

and that's my 2 cents cheers!

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If the lack animated turrets are really ruining this game for you that much then I suggest you go play a game that eschews gameplay for bleeding-edge tech and graphics -- cough Crysis cough -- and leave the galactic conquering to people who are more interested in gameplay, balance and strategy then gee-wiz, wham-bang, LOLZ particle-effect lovin'.

Bad idea, unless you can gimmick it. The reason for this is that if you make it an option, and a high-end player (with option enabled) and a low-end player (with option disabled) play against each other, then you have a desynch. The reason for THIS is:
If one player has rotating turrets, then the turrets delay firing until lined up. If the other has static turrets, then they fire immediately. So the same ship takes different amounts of time to fire on either system. Desynch.
This desynch is remedied by one especiaclly useful way. If you delay all turrets, animated or otherwise, firing by a set time (say, 1 second), then there are no desynchs. Then, a player with animated turrets has the turrets line up in a hard 1 second (so a turret would only ever line up in that period of time, whether pointing 90 or a 180 degrees away) and fire. This is, though, a gimmick, but there is still nothing REALLY wrong with it, as far as I can see. I think Lightzy brought this up in the "turrets don't move in beta4" thread - all conceivable arguments are in there, as far as I see.

As to modding, I would support that

You're forgetting something critically important. The developers were aiming the minimum hardware requirements to be at an ATi 9600 graphics card and 1.8 GHz single core desktop CPU. While all these extra bells and whistles make sense to you, someone running one of those low end systems would not be able to handle the advanced graphical systems you're asking for. Could they have been included into the game as options? Sure, but at the cost of additional development time and resources. These resources would have been diverted from quality assurance and gameplay tuning.

It would raise the system requirements a lot. Not everyone upgrades their PCs with Sli 8800 and such every year. If they can make the game go lower in requirements at the cost of moving turrets (=O) that you would only care about for a couple battles then they are going to do it. I don't know why people care about the graphics so much. The gameplay is what makes a game, look at starcraft, worst graphics I have seen but people still play it. Now they are making the 2nd that is the exact same but with "better" graphics for those people who need eye candy

It's a simple enough feature and there's no other excuse for it rather than lack of time, so no doubt there will be features like this in the future. Just as the actual shots fire in a certain direction the turrets could just as easy point in that same direction.

It's a smaller mathematic formula and some turret designs, and adjusted Level Of Detail systematics.

I have no doubt we will see much greater graphics in the future. Have a look at X3 - Reunion if you want to see some truly awesome space graphics. The stations and capital ships are HUGE in comparison to a fightercraft. I drool just thinking about it.

http://www.egosoft.com/games/x3/screenshots/x3_screen_055.jpg

Spot the fighter? There's a small fighter flying on top of one of the solar panels of a solar plant. That's epic designs.