Yet Another Remake Attempt

[Denacity]

I would like to also make the notion that server hosts should have access to various variables like Moth balance, hangar names, what hangars do, etc.

I would even go so far to say that the location of buildings could be server side, with a way of letting players move stuff around and create their own worlds.

But yeah, a working offline Alpha Crater demo would be pretty cool.

[irjayjay]

PLEASE NOTE, SHREKKEN AND I ARE NOT THE SAME PERSON.

Apologies for the caps. I think on bulletin boards it's easy to lose track of who said what.

SHREKKEN is the talented moth modeller.
I am the guy making my own Hardwar remake.

LS: I can see you thought through everything I said and I'm going to print out your reply and add it to my notebook, your response is extremely wise and valuable.

Currently I'm working on flight mechanics and docking.

Flight is now Hardwar-esque and I've eliminated most of the bugs I had, now it's just smoothing the flight and getting animations to be less abrupt.

I started on docking an hour ago, currently just getting the airlock to sense the moth and open the outer doors. It's quite a long sequence to do, not to mention taking over control from the user and moving the moth into a bay... That's gonna be tough.

Though I'm building Alpha and trying to stick to the Hardwar we love, I know very well that verbatim-copying is a huge time waste.
So wherever I can get away with it, I am adding "improvements" (functionality that doesn't match Hardwar, but is easier to implement and actually improves upon the old game).
One of these is the flight model... it'll take forever to get it exact, instead I'll settle for 85% there, and most won't notice the difference after playing my game for 2 minutes.

As for the models: I have an untextured moth and an airlock modelled. I'm careful to not model what I can't script for yet, so what you see is what you get.

I only model when I don't have internet(yeah, we get power cuts in my country), just saying.

I am still not convinced we need a fully dynamic economy. Every company to ever try that has broken their own game and had to hard-code tolerances, the same goes for Hardwar, the trade centres having enough money to buy all the time is no mistake.

Anyway, time I hit the sack, more coding tomorrow, maybe I can get all the door animations to work and get started on moving the moth toward a hangar bay... Just maybe.

[Denacity]

one thing i would consider changing, when you dock just stay in 1st person view

[irjayjay]

Thanx Teeth03. Yeah, I think controlling 3rd person cameras like the original might be difficult slightly more work for very little gain(if it is even gain), also, it would look pretty cool in first person. Perfect example of something that doesn't need to be like the original.

I'm wrestling through the idea of getting out of your moth. It's already possible in my game, the question is why?

It's probably the biggest feature I wanted in hardwar, having more to explore, not just in the crater, but inside buildings.
I want it to be possible for you to live without a moth, maybe trading very low amounts by travelling by monorail until your hard work pays off and you take to the skies again.

However, being killed on foot would suck, because you'd lose all your moths and buildings if you don't have a clone and killing on foot is much quicker.

I also want the user to be able to stay in their moth and access the computer to buy/sell/etc. directly as with the current game.
Sometimes you dock quickly to get rid of your goods, only to launch to go kill the pirate that nearly killed you.

[irjayjay]

Someone mentioned having admins control building placement.
We'll see, I have no idea how easy it would be to implement.

Much later, if I even get there, I intend to implement hangar building, but it would be ridiculously expensive to build one. Something to do with all your amassed riches.

So each crater will start with about the same amount of buildings as Hardwar has now, but as the game progresses, it should become much more dense.

[shrekken]

Don't worry about wandering around on foot. I know many of us love the idea but it's not a necessity and it can be put in later when the important stuff is done, though I will say that will be a lot of modelling work to make it look good. We do need an economy that works but it doesn't have to be anything complicated. Just enough so that we can manufacture, buy and sell. But all of that can be looked at later.

One thing I've noticed is the scale of hardwar is off. The buildings feel way too small (considering the level of tech in 1998 though...). When I build a moth, I work to a 1:1 scale, for example, the Neo Tiger really is 5.87 meters wide, 8.77 meters long and 1.78 meters tall (with landing gear up). So when you make your buildings, modelling them to scale will give you a realistic scale to work with. Just measure the height of your room to get a basic measurement to work from.

I can't wait to see more of what you've done. I'm not a coder at all and struggle with that stuff (yeah I know UE4 is visual as well but there's still a level of coding to understand).

[irjayjay]

shrekken:
I am worried about wandering around on foot, because that's a core principal I want in the game I'm building, it also took me only an hour to implement. I'm using free assets from Unreal Engine wherever I can, so I might not have to model player characters, though they'll probably all look similar to begin with.

I get you with the scale thing. I took screenshots of the silver-Y in front of an airlock and calculated the silver-Y length to about 4-4.5meters(considering the average pilot is 1.8m) and from that I gauge that the airlock door is about 8 meters wide by 4 meters high.
Hexagonal buildings have sides of about 30m wide by 12m high on each of the sides, making its radius also 30m, meaning it's 60m wide at it's widest part.

I also timed how long it takes a Silver-Y to travel across the width of Alpha crater, it takes about 31 seconds. In my game it takes about 28 seconds currently.

Yesterday I got the airlock to work in all the phases going in, going out doesn't trigger yet, but should take me a few minutes to get it working too. Then there's binding an airlock to a building and later I'll add player IDs and black/white listing for certain players(only after multiplayer works though).

I'm gonna figure out how to do a screen recording, then I'll upload a video of my progress in-game. It's nice and all hearing about what I've done, but I'm sure you guys want to see the results.

[shrekken]

Just give all the player characters helmets and it'll be fine! hehe!

My silver y came out at 3.54m wide and 7.53m long, but you might want to make the airlock 12m deep by 9m wide (the height is fine)... The deaths head is huge, 8.1m wide by 11.4m long.

Try obs studio for recording. I've used it for recording and streaming. It's free too obsproject.com

[irjayjay]

Cool, managed to get a recording. OBS wasted an hour of my time, so I just used free Fraps for now, no time to try software that doesn't do what it says.

I've uploaded 2 videos to my youtube channel quickly. Hope this at least generates some excitement. As always, textures and lighting sucks and is not final, it's literally just there so it doesn't all look grey.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmlBLCVsBDI&list=PLsgbzoyFQbfdFbk7JzkBoe5wGei6d1kJZ&index=2&t=0s&fbclid=IwAR3SecTfOw6SlUJGCUbE3cnu7IwB_Eywc4oZjeKR9F9zfkj2Ylh86kJCzkc

[shrekken]

Ok... That's awesome!!! Just getting things to work is always exciting. Don't worry about textures and lighting at these early stages... Damn good so far though!

[extratitanian]

Nice. The flying looked like a way more responsive/smooth Hardwar.

[irjayjay]

Yeah, so it's pretty much direct movement from the mouse input, but I need to smooth it a little somehow, to give it some immersion. It's not high on my priorities yet though.

[Denacity]

Very Nice!

[irjayjay]

Here's what I've done since my last post:

• smoothed out mouse flight - no more jaggedy movements
  
• fixed a bug with pitch and ascending descending - the moth would end up flying backwards
  
• finished up the airlock animations and triggers - you can now enter and exit the airlock over and over and it won't get stuck.
  
• added a quick rough texture to the Silver-Y - I'll probably replace this moth completely later, but it taught me how to do UV mapping for future models

So here's the screenshots from the game with the new textures in it:

[irjayjay]

Here's some updated videos, various smaller tweaks were done.

Video 1
youtu.be/lmsotDMrFQY

Video 2
youtu.be/uXrg9Dg4bjY


Mostly visual tweaks and showing off of the working airlock mechanics. 
Added quick camera pan, it was easy to add and allows me to show off the moth and world better when making videos and taking screenshots.

I was controlling the moth myself inside the hangar. It's really that easy to fly, so I'm doubting that I'll add autopilot at all. I'll just have to somehow prevent players from launching if someone else is entering or flying around, which should be easier.