Scale

from Sins Forums
Having modded the beta somewhat I now want to try my hand at modding the real deal, so I have a few questions for the community :)

Scale - I love big ships, I love small ships zipping around the big ships with all hell breaking loose. To that effect I want change the scale of the ships and the scale of planets.

Now as far as I'm aware theres two ways of doing this, I remember rightly I could adjust the scale of a star for example via script. Normally I would have to extract the model, scale it up or down, adjust the texture accordlingly and important the model & texture back in game, but I am sure they is something in one the files that can control the scale of a model by appereance at least in the scripts.

So the question is, can this be done and if so how?

The second question in relation to scale is unit behaviour, I want to adjust the frigates so they really small frigates & corvettes, I want to make the crusiers larger and I want to make to make the captial ships exactly that. However with the frigates I want them act more like fighter craft in terms of movment and speed, to zip around bigger ships on a 3d plane and never (unless instructed to via hold postion command) to be stationary. Fighters similarly I want to be crazy on the 3d plane. Crusiers & Captial ships remain as they are with some 3d movement, what I don't want is ships crashing in each other (unless intended) or flying off into distance because of there speed, so how can I adjust the flight behaviour, how the ship views other ships and there speed.

Finally how can I adjust the planets scale to be larger (with larger grav wells) buildings to be smaller and how do I prevent the icon zoom, when zooming out on the map?

Thanks
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4,049 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
In regards to scale of celestial objects: there's nothing in their entity files to scale them up or down by changing a value. My guess is you still have to mess around with a mesh.

In regards to making frigates fly like fighters: this seems to be tied to the entityType, so "Squad"s are fighters and behave like it, but "Ship"s don't, and can't be made to. You could potentially have 1 fighter in a squad and give it a bigger model, but you couldn't put abilities on it and it would be much more limited in what you can make it do (number of weapons, firing points, etc).

To change the icon zoom distance, most things have ZoomDistance value in their entity files that you can change.
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
From what i have seen so far the ship models in sins are "true scaled" meaning 1 unit in a modeling program like 3dsmax is 1 meter. It is the celestial objects like planets asteroids etc. that are scaled down for self explanatory reasons. I wouldnt want to think about how big a "true scaled" planet would be in game.
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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
Humongous. Unplayably so. :) But as with movie fights, one does not have to actually hit someone, just make it appear so. With planets, increasing their size five times creates that effect in my opinion. I built a space station in "low orbit" to test this and it works really well, especially when you zoom out a little.

Unfortunately, planet resizing has its own set of problems. For one, you have to edit the mesh in a 3D program. No way, as Annatar said, to do it by editing .entity files. Second, there seems to be a hardcoded texture animation on the mesh for the cloud layer. Unfortunately, this does not scale for some reason. So if you do enlarge the planet, the clouds dissapear, and start creating a weird pulsating effect for the planet's lighting. You can disable this, of course, but you then lose the cloud layer. Right now I am circumventing this by rendering a cloud layer directly on the texture of the planet. It works, but I am not completely satisfied with it.

Scale-wise, if we take the bounding radius into account, my planets are now 50km wide. In comparison, Earth is 6700km "wide".