yo all.

I made this station for my mod,





I'm having difficulty figuring out the best way to implement it with its animation, into my mod.

and this is going to be a recuring theme in my mod so id really rather hear a lot of peoples thoughts on it.

ive thought about using animated textures for the proppellers of my crafts, but then that leaves me with the problem of creating the texture for one, and thats something im not very good at, is texturing, i can do the basic job alright, but to make it look believable is just seemingly impossible for me at this time, then i had a aesthetic issue with this, what would it look like from far away, would you just see a square polygon with no texture on it? i don't know.

then theres the even harder task of getting it into the game and making it look good.

then i thought about having the propellers as animated physical models, but the animation procedure just seems so long winded and again in 3DSmax, that its near impossible for me to accomplish. not to mention I can find no evidence that animation works on models without player input, so ive no basis for comparison.

before all that comes the actual getting it into the game, im not familiar with the procedure for station input into freelancer, is it the same as all the other models with a few more hardpoints for docking locations.


and finally, I was wondering about the movement of this station, it would be interesting if the station was able to slowly move around the 'system' in a random manner within a designated area.

im not sure if thats possible so then i thought about what if it was an NPC ship, then it would be able to move, but would you also be able to dock on it? and if yes and you docked would it dissapear once you undocked from it, since technically you were not in space so all npc's vanish.


I would appreciate any insight into these thoughts and questions i have.

there is also another way to get around the 18 groups limit which i think i posted way back. it's all about the vmeshref, simply export with different group spans and pick the parts you need, copy them to the master.

Hidamari:
i would definitely use model animation, it's not so hard as it seems.
by the way i think the model looks very cool, and don't worry about the "realism" concerns raised, after all the whole game is science fiction.

thanks guys for the comments, mini_me's post was a lot to take in

I supposed a station that remains still is the best course of action to take, i was just interested in hearing if there are any ways to get an alternative scheme going.

and yes Mini_me im aware of the realistic elements involved with a flying object like this, thats why, its not real ^^


the animation thing is still baffling me, i keep hearing that the middle of the scene is where the animation will be rotating from as its pivot, but does that mean id only be able to have 1 propeller that rotates? since only 1 could be in the centre and the rest would be out to the sides.

@RimShot, glad you like the model, it is impractical but meh.. lol im hoping to someday get the hang of animation in the model process.

@Nightstalker, thats quite a good idea, but my ships also have propellers, so id only really be avoiding the issue