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+--- Thread: bring back the old style (/showthread.php?tid=165)
bring back the old style - nightslaysanta - 08-03-2018
using the old style method of building and use it as a alternative for rooms
RE: bring back the old style - Phenoix12 - 08-03-2018
This topic has been discussed and debated to the ground already. I'm sure that there is no chance old style is coming back to the forfront of Hazeron. Even now it's slowly being gutted away to nothing.
I think you can't even access the old style designer at all anymore now as Haxus mentioned he was just removing it fully from the code to reduse the file sizes as it's no longer needed.
RE: bring back the old style - Deantwo - 08-04-2018
You are more likely to see new-new-style than you are a return of old-style. As Haxus has said in the past, "there is no backwards only forward!" And he also says, "nothing is cast in concrete."
There is no guarantee that the new-style designer will stay forever, Haxus replace things that don't work or have become the "ugliest" part of the game first.
Pretty much, nothing is final, and things will get better over time.
RE: bring back the old style - Mr. Mortius - 08-04-2018
I might be understanding things differently, but do you mean an equivalent of the room drawer that was in the old designer for the new one? That'd be convenient to have.
RE: bring back the old style - Deantwo - 08-04-2018
(08-04-2018, 01:20 PM)Mr. Mortius Wrote: I might be understanding things differently, but do you mean an equivalent of the room drawer that was in the old designer for the new one? That'd be convenient to have.
Yeah that has been suggested a few times, would be useful.
RE: bring back the old style - QuakeIV - 08-05-2018
If interiors had a system like the old designer, that would be pretty fantastic. Right now hostile boardings would be effectively non viable as ships could be designed with non-navigable interiors far beyond what had been seen even with the previous system. AI troopers would be even more useless in that role as well.
New system exteriors and more rigidly defined interiors would allow really flexible designs while also providing a reasonable set of rules for what an interior is so that combat is at the very least more reasonable.
RE: bring back the old style - Vectorus - 08-05-2018
We have suggested drawable interiors to Haxus in-game and he thought it a reasonable idea. As a supplement to the existing system, I think so too.
I would, however, be strongly against its replacing the existing system. You spend almost all of your time around ships inside them. Most of the value of the new designer is its freedom to create interesting interiors, not exteriors. Boarding a totally alien craft you've never seen before, not knowing if their species are water-dwelling, spaceborne, two inches tall, forty feet tall, should be an enormous challenge for a poor human space marine. It can be an exciting discovery, even if it gets you killed a lot. Boarding a craft built for ants is, in any space opera worth its salt, probably going to be impossible.
Perhaps the challenge could be better balanced by some sort of analysis probe. If shields are down, or starting from inside the ship, you can commence a full scan, which would reveal the interior layout: essentially giving you a copy of the room void parts and door parts to review in the designer. Would give some value to stealth ships and recon in the future. Or a handheld scanner to reveal door locations and voids in your immediate vicinity. Helmet HUD could help with this; it's already approaching that function with lifesign detection. A team that had worked for it could board efficiently, one that hadn't would get stuck and slaughtered.
Creating interiors is much easier now than it was before; making it harder again would be a step back. I used to go through dozens of prototypes in the old designer: had to change room numbers, room was illegal because surrounded by another room, room had glass windows everywhere I couldn't change and made hull look weird, had to create ten rooms just to make pillars or railing, everything lagged to heck while deleting etc. A new room, if it's a simple textured shape, takes under a minute to make in blender and import, complete with associated voids. Copying a door takes seconds. Granted, adding windows, stairs and things will slow you down. But that was the case in the old designer too, if you wanted any fine control. You'd have to carefully intersperse different room types to get windows where you wanted them (groan).
I'm fairly sure someone clever could make an addon for blender that makes rooms out of a floor plan. Then it could just make a shrunk copy of the room for the voids. Any takers?
RE: bring back the old style - Celarious - 08-05-2018
(08-05-2018, 09:48 AM)Vectorus Wrote: Creating interiors is much easier now than it was before
I'm sorry but this is a complete bullshit statement
It takes hours in the new designer to make any kind of decent interior, and that's if you don't bother with paths, door connections, turbolifts, complex textures, complex voids, complex barriers, lighting, jigs and jig problems, and ignore most of the key functions of the designer
In the old designer, one could easily make a decent looking lounge next to a bridge at the top, bottom or side of the ship in under 5 minutes, a spacious one too if the "open to below" function was used
All the other issues you mentioned such as lagging only occurred in the online designer which you shouldn't be using, room numbers were an obvious and simple fix, and railings were easy to make regardless of what you think
And yes, a simple textured shape takes under a minute to make in blender and import if it's a cube with no detail, and even then you'll have to re-texture it in the new designer, apply voids, and then apply doors. If it's anything more detailed, you'll be creating it in blender for hours, and then spending another 20 hours applying voids, doors, textures, barriers, paths, ladders, and lighting to it, and that's just for a single room... Meanwhile in the old designer you'd spend an hour at most on an entire TL32 ship
Sure, the old designer didn't allow for fine control of windows but it was easy to use and you didn't require hours of time and knowledge of complex 3D modelling software, and now it's been replaced with an extremely unfriendly and boring indie modelling program and all of the good parts of the old designer were removed just for that
Don't even get me started on how there's no connection between ship function and design with the new system, or how extremely hard it is to link the hull and the interior and how there's no connection between those either
RE: bring back the old style - AnrDaemon - 08-05-2018
I would not say it was an hour for TL32 ship, but certainly i could have a working prototype in under a day, and finish it to completion in another day.
The obvious quality of the old designer is (was) the fact that the function was the product of the form. You literally created the ship functionality with your own hands. Easy and direct.
With new designer, it's all disconnected an not obvious.
RE: bring back the old style - QuakeIV - 08-05-2018
This is all about allowing people to fight eachother seriously, since this game has the possibility of war, and things will get serious if people are trying to settle their differences. If anything the playerbase has dwindled to the current size because even in the old system it was very difficult to resolve conflicts within the rules of the game, and the new ship designer only worsens that. If you can just create really laggy/screwy geometry and make it impossible to board your ships, then that is a huge and unfun advantage that more or less shuts down conflict on both sides as you get an arms race on how best to break the game (as has happened in the past).
I mainly am proposing something along the lines of automated pathing and colliders. I'm not arguing against things like allowing ant sized species their ant sized hallways, although that sort of thing basically requires any real militaries to use ant sized crews. Thats fine in my opinion, and honestly kindof hilarious.
Its another matter entirely if someone is allowed to create crazy geometry that is completely unintelligible to humans and not pathable by the ai at all.
If you required people to draw collider and path map things in something distantly resembling the old style, and then enabled an option for interiors to be rendered off of that instead of the player defined geometry, then that would remove all possibility of creating impossible to navigate interiors. It would also further erase all incentive to create deliberately screwy/laggy geometry as the enemy could just turn it off as needed and see the smooth/rectangular collider geometry. The pointlessness of being an asshole should in turn lead to people almost never having to use that mode, so you can for the most part see peoples fancy interiors they spent time on.