Lino, how about some X4 graphic specials?

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Killjaeden
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Post by Killjaeden »

Talking about ship design... after seeing the latest stream and ships i couldnt get the image out of my head...
Image
The cockpits of the combat ships look like goldfish bowls attached to a stump of a body :/

And my fear/prejudice about the Ship class beeing able to dock its smaller class... has unfortunately been confirmed.
The ship with the full sized, walkable dock platform (osprey?) you showed just shows this. It looks off, because the size difference between the classes is not large enough. It looks like it's purpose is to be a car garage with wheels or helicopter pad with rotary wing essentially or naval dock with 1 pier that floats - goofy and pointless. It would be much better if ships with docking tube system (ala airplane dock https://www.featurepics.com/StockImage/ ... 334868.jpg to transfer personal and some clamp or whatever to hold it in place. This way not 70% of the bodies volumen and proportion is dictated by a secondary utility function.
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Post by DaMuncha »

Killjaeden wrote:Talking about ship design... after seeing the latest stream and ships i couldnt get the image out of my head...
Image
The cockpits of the combat ships look like goldfish bowls attached to a stump of a body :/.
And you just figured out how can can put Boron in the game. Just turn the Fish bowl cockpit into .. a fishbowl, with a boron inside it.

How can they make Boron walk on space stations? Boron Hamster Balls!
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Post by spacecoyote99 »

Skeeter wrote:Painting spaceships tbh is unrealistic, the only reason games/film do it is for visual impact thinking the public wants flashy coloured ships etc when in reality they would never be painted as its totally useless and a waste.
Speaking as one of the public, if I were in the market for a space ship I'd definitely go for one with cool red stripes rather than a gray box. You may not see the colors out in space but you sure can see them on the docking platform.

As for man hours, cars aren't painted by hand in the factory any more either. And even if it's many gallons of paint, I'd think the cost would be a drop (of paint) in the bucket compared to propulsion, navigation, let alone weapons systems.
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Post by JSDD »

linolafett wrote:Big changes from xr to x4:
-change to a "pbr" physicially based rendering
-change to a deferred renderer
-change to vulkan
the second and third one are things an artist doesnt have to bother with anyway, that's just for the programmer. 2nd is just a technique, it creates a "g-buffer" (g for geometry), uses multiple layers of textures (material properties, HDR light info maybe, geometry, that is position+normal of rendered polygons), in a "deferred" step it shades the the scene using these textures (or framebuffer "layers"), avoiding the necessity to shade covered fragments with complicated lighing algorithms (as in "forward rendering"), .. nothing that matters to an artist ... the 3rd is just the graphics API (api = application programming interface), again something that doesnt matter to an artist, or is there a difference for you if egosoft would say: "now we decided to use direct3D / openGL" to do graphics .. ? you just have to provide meshes and materials + textures which (sometimes) have a certain "convention" about the color channels (rgba and their "meaning") of the different texture types, that's it.

BurnIt! wrote:Colour schemes are always a controversial topic, it's a difficult balance to strike. Tastes are different and where one person likes a look borderlining on greyscale another wants something more bright and lively.
but since you are now going "pbr", why are you botherig AT ALL with the color sceme ? what i'd do is prepare 1 set of realistic materials we all know from the real world ...

--> chrome
--> rubber
--> some PE stuff
--> glass
--> glowing plasma stuff
--> .. you know what ...
--> roughness in different levels
(separated from the other material properties)

... and re-use them all the time when creating new or modifying content ?

for example:
--> argon ship hull, metallic (maybe "black-ish" painted), rough
--> split ship hull, rusty metallic, very rough
--> skin of characters: something smooth, non-shiny
--> interior: metallic smooth, some rubber in-between etc ..

in the post-processing of the scene (for the programmer, not the artist!!), the player could have some choices between gray scale / glowing / shininess / etc pp, so that everyone can adjust the graphics to personal preferences ... and for the modders, the possibility to change these materials (of course! ;)) .. besides the fact that creating custom content should be supported in the final game, otherwise we rely on the limited number of artsts at egosoft for new content
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Post by Killjaeden »

JSDD wrote:but since you are now going "pbr", why are you botherig AT ALL with the color sceme ? what i'd do is prepare 1 set of realistic materials we all know from the real world ...

--> chrome
--> rubber
--> some PE stuff
--> glass
--> glowing plasma stuff
--> .. you know what ...
--> roughness in different levels
(separated from the other material properties)

... and re-use them all the time when creating new or modifying content ?

for example:
--> argon ship hull, metallic (maybe "black-ish" painted), rough
--> split ship hull, rusty metallic, very rough
--> skin of characters: something smooth, non-shiny
--> interior: metallic smooth, some rubber in-between etc ..
Then you have base colors, but no texture. Textures still need to be created from this. Yes there are methods to do it half-procedurally (unity/UE can use substance designer materials with exposed parameters for tweaking ) but i doubt this is in the scope of Egosofts art team.
Multimat texture sets do need more than just base colors or base textures. They need greeble and other things to make ships look more detailed than they actually are in terms of the mesh .
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Post by Commander_K »

JSDD wrote:but since you are now going "pbr", why are you botherig AT ALL with the color sceme ? what i'd do is prepare 1 set of realistic materials we all know from the real world ...
The artist still need to decide, if they want neon green rubber or brown leather on a chair for example. Or how many glowing pink stripes should be on the ship.
JSDD wrote:in the post-processing of the scene (for the programmer, not the artist!!), the player could have some choices between gray scale / glowing / shininess / etc pp, so that everyone can adjust the graphics to personal preferences ... and for the modders, the possibility to change these materials (of course! ;)) .. besides the fact that creating custom content should be supported in the final game, otherwise we rely on the limited number of artsts at egosoft for new content
As far as I understood from the last stream, that's exactly what is happening with the color correction.
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Post by Skeeter »

Don't forget egosoft usually outsource alot of their art to other companies due to lack of personal. Things like ships, stations and character models. I think egosoft does the designs with concept art then it's passed to the other company. Tho I'm sure a few things are done in house as I remember they did alot of work on capships for rebirth iirc as a video showed and explained they had to redo it a number of times to get the right design and I'm sure lino is one of their artists as he showed making things a few times.
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Post by Santi »

I am pretty sure it is the other way around, for X Rebirth I remember they hired some famous sci-fi artist to do the concepts and then the in house art department did the main work. For example the Xenon I if I remember correctly is Lino's baby.
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Post by linolafett »

All ships are currently done inhouse, as the requirements and setup are complex enough, that it creates too much overhead to be effective to be useful.

Most stationparts went through outsourcing, rather few of those are done inhouse (edit: aside of the blockouts, they are all done by us).
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Post by Lc4Hunter »

Any Chance to get this thing (back) into business, Lino?

Would love to see the good old Titan back ingame, hehe ;)
Polycount should be ok for ingame usage i think.

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Post by csaba »

Lc4Hunter wrote:Any Chance to get this thing (back) into business, Lino?

Would love to see the good old Titan back ingame, hehe ;)
Polycount should be ok for ingame usage i think.

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I always wondered about that. Came to the conclusion that it looked too much like Starship Troopers spaceships and Egosoft tried to avoid copyright issues later on since in X3R Argon capitals turned into... well... bricks.... so it was suspicious. Although the Taranis does regain some of it's front features in XR without the iconic 4 way thrusters, you can't deny the resemblance.

Image


On a somewhat similair note. The Discoverer looks kinda weird now. While I liked most of the new designs sofar that one stood out as way to unrealistic. I know there is know air in space but those new forward wing things look stupid and having an aerodynamic profile that would be even affected in the thin gasclouds in space.... I quite liked the X2 and X3 versions but this one is just plain ugly. :(
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Post by Lc4Hunter »

Well, i don´t think there is too much similarity to the Roger Young except the X-engines. The wohle body is totally different. Don´t understand why people did the comparison.
If you do this you can also say that the Titan´s engines were copied from a Babylon5 Starfury and so on...

I can see more similarity between the Galactica and the Arawn but why not? I think this is more a tribute than a copy. :)
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Post by linolafett »

Ship/surface elements and docks dimensions shape the ships massively in x4, so a copy of old designs is difficult to borderline impossible.
The titan design is not carried over.
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Post by Lc4Hunter »

linolafett wrote:Ship/surface elements and docks dimensions shape the ships massively in x4, so a copy of old designs is difficult to borderline impossible.
The titan design is not carried over.
So i hope there will be some good modding tool allowing us to find a way to get this thing back into business.
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Post by JSDD »

linolafett wrote:Ship/surface elements and docks dimensions shape the ships massively in x4, so a copy of old designs is difficult to borderline impossible.
The titan design is not carried over.
are there special requirements for ship models that can be included to X4 ? multiple mesh LODs for example (how many), or the scene's structure (node types) ? maximum element count per mesh (ushort or uint) ? any recommendations ? we assume that all models need to have a properly designed interior, do the meshes visible from within have to separated from the outer meshes (ship hull) ? and what's the scale of the dimensions (meter or mm) ? how big are the usual docking port dimensions for each class (s m l xl etc) ?
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Post by linolafett »

JSDD wrote: are there special requirements for ship models that can be included to X4 ? multiple mesh LODs for example (how many), or the scene's structure (node types) ? maximum element count per mesh (ushort or uint) ? any recommendations ? we assume that all models need to have a properly designed interior, do the meshes visible from within have to separated from the outer meshes (ship hull) ? and what's the scale of the dimensions (meter or mm) ? how big are the usual docking port dimensions for each class (s m l xl etc) ?

Let's try. Here is some stuff from our asset setup document.
I dont jump into the part count or polycounts, as this is a bit more difficult to quickly write down. Cockpits are seperated from the outer hull to have them fade out quickly.
The cockpits have to reachable by foot when the ship is standing on a planar dock, so have a ramp or ladder reach down to give acces to the cockpit (or a "transporter room" which functuíons as kind of lift- needed for m ships)

Following listed are the scale specs for all ships and their surface elements. These are bounding box sizes, a ship (with all surface elements) is not allowed to be bigger than this defined boundingbox size.
All dimension units are in meters.

With these numbers you can create some blocks in your favourite 3d modeling program and see how many elements you can stick together, before it starts to look cramped ;)

Dimensions per ship class (width / height / length):
xs (ability drones, escape pods) - 2,5 / 2,5 / 2,5 (MAX)
s (fighter/scout ships/fighter drones) - 35 / 25 / 35 (MAX)
m (standart trading/mining ship, corvette, frigate) - 90 / 90 / 150 (MAX)
l (large traders, destroyers) - 600 / 600 / 600 (MAX)
XL (carriers/builderships) - 2000 / 2000 / 2000 (MAX)

Dock dimensions:

S (s hips can dock here) 40 / 30 / 45
M (m ships can dock here) 185 / 115 / 115

A ship can carry a dock of the size below its own category, a m ship can carry a single s dock. A l ship can easily carry multiple s docks but probably only a single m dock.
Docks are always a bit bigger than the ships which can dock there to have some space around the "airlock" for you to walk around.

Maximum weapon amount (this is a UI limit, we dont have more space in the HUD (crosshair element) to display more slots. (s/m ships. Larger ships are set up differently, they can hae more turrets, they are then grouped)

8 forward facing weapons and 8 individual turrets.

So far our most amount of installed weapons is 5 on a paranid medium sized ship. S ships have usually between 1 and 4 slots.

Talking about weapon (surface elements in general) and their slots, of course these elements also have dimensions. This means all elements of the same size are technicially exchangeable, sometimes restricted by gamedesign is think (defined via compatibility tags, so an xml edito can be used to mod that).


Weapons (forward facing pew pew)
s 2x2x6
m 8x8x24
l will be mayor part of a ship,
not exchangeable
"Model ship around weapon"
s/m weapons can gimbal about 10° to left and right or up an down, so keep a visual cone in front of the mount free to avoud bullets intersecting with the ship geometry.

Turrets
s Small ships wont carry turrets
m 16x16x16
l 64x64x64

Engines
s 4x4x8
m 12x12x24
l r=25 x50
xl r=75 x150

Shieldgenerator
s 2x1x4 (2m wide, 1m high, 4m long)
m 8x4x16 (unhittable)
8x8x16 (hittable)
l 32x32x64
xl 96x96x192

turrets
s Small ships wont carry turrets
m 16x16x16
l 64x64x64
fold the turrets when inactive.
max height should be only reached in active state.
max size includes the rotating barrel
(should not poke out of boundingbox).

m ships can only carry m turrets.
l and xl ships can carry l and m sized turrets.


Hope that helps a bit to visualize dimensions and especially relations between these sizes. A fighter is a tiny tiny dot next to a carrier.
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Post by Lc4Hunter »

Thanks for this informations. For me these informations are very useful :D
I have one question about the weapon groups:

Are these groups like the cockpits in X3 we allready know?
Do all turrets of a groups move and turn in the same direction and do they all fire just on the same target?

Is it (technically) possible to add more then 8 turret groups or is it a hardcoded limit like in X3 with the 6 cockpits? I know it would cause an UI error or would not be shown but, just in theory, would it be possible?
For example you create a ship with 12 turrets and don´t want to group them to 8. Each turret should work for itself.

---

And again: Thanks a lot lino for this informations. Nice to read such stuff.
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Post by csaba »

linolafett wrote:
Weapons (forward facing pew pew)

L will be mayor part of a ship,
not exchangeable
"Model ship around weapon"
Wait... this means we will have big main guns on destroyers a.k.a. Sucellus design?
Sounds interesting if I read it right.
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Post by Tamina »

csaba wrote:
linolafett wrote:Weapons (forward facing pew pew)

L will be mayor part of a ship,
not exchangeable
"Model ship around weapon"
we will have big main guns on destroyers a.k.a. Sucellus design?
Sounds interesting if I read it right.
Yes - this was adressed in the Q&A.

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Post by elexis »

linolafett wrote:l (large traders, destroyers) - 600 / 600 / 600 (MAX)
XL (carriers/builderships) - 2000 / 2000 / 2000 (MAX)
Borg cube confirmed :wink:

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