More Deployable Parts in the Ship Designer & Custom Shield Sections

[Tipper]

I absolutely love being able to animate doors and landing legs. The ability to do the landing gear animation is wonderful, and I think it should be implemented into other actions a ship can take. All of these suggestions will function the same as landing gear, where you designate a mesh as a part with states, then you can add states to represent different levels of deployment (from Open to Closed with the 8 other steps included, also including states for broken or stuck)

• Weapon Deployment - They activate when you have an active attack/patrol order or otherwise have your weapon systems ready to fire.
  
• Fire Animations - Would need to be have both the weapon deployment and the fire animation. Examples include large barrel guns having recoil, laser lens focusing, or missile launch bays opening.
  
• Shield Deployment - When your shields are up, this part appears. A big shield projector bulb rising out of the top of a ship.
  
• FTL Drive Deployment - When your you're traveling to via wormholes or have a deadhead order active, your FTL drive deploys. This would be useful if your ship wanted to appear to have deployable warp nacelles like in Star Trek (see gif below)
  

• FTL Drive Animations - When your FTL Drive is charging and activating, allow some animations to show it. For example would be the engine room having animations where the reactor is shoved into overdrive, or the warp rings on a ship spinning up (see below)
  

• Looping Ship Idle Animations - when the parts on your ship move its just cool, I'd love to have outer  sections of the ship animate when your ship is simply powered on - for example, the rings around a reactor core or the movement of pistons
  

Also, this is only tangentially related to these suggestions, but these ideas also gave me the idea of allowing the ship designer designate faces/meshes of the ship as shield sections. This would allow the designer to make nicer looking shields, a big upgrade from the typical streched shield bubble that every ship has.  Though to keep it newbie designer friendly, an option to use the default shield bubble should be added. To avoid exploits where you're able to hide your shield, you'd probably want to include a check that all the shield faces don't cross through any other parts other than shield sections.

Let me know what you think.

[AnrDaemon]

[*]FTL Drive Deployment - When your you're traveling to via wormholes or have a deadhead order active, your FTL drive deploys. This would be useful if your ship wanted to appear to have deployable warp nacelles like in Star Trek (see gif below)
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Now, imagine these deployable "nacells" activate. What happens to the ship?

[Tipper]

Not sure what you're getting at?

As the spacecraft powered up whichever FTL drive is associated with these parts, the nacelles would deploy out from the spacecraft like they are in the gif (extending out from the spaceship's interior), and if you textured them right they'd glow as they powered up. Then your FTL drive would activate. Pretty much the same thing as what happens right now except now you have a little bit of animation (assuming you designed the spacecraft in such a manner to utilize this animation).

[AnrDaemon]

They will turn around the axles where the arms attached to the hull, and crash into the hull, destroying the craft. At best. At worst, they will turn around the axle where they are attached to the extension arm, wreak the arms and fly away, leaving the ship stranded in the hyperspace without any way or chance for return. This is what happens when sci-fi is filmed by scientists and fantasts, without consultation with a simple technician.

[Tipper]

They will turn around the axles where the arms attached to the hull, and crash into the hull, destroying the craft. At best. At worst, they will turn around the axle where they are attached to the extension arm, wreak the arms and fly away, leaving the ship stranded in the hyperspace without any way or chance for return. This is what happens when sci-fi is filmed by scientists and fantasts, without consultation with a simple technician.

... You're really nitpicking the GIF I used, which is the only real gif of any media ever with a deployable FTL Drive, because it's unrealistic science fiction?




Alright, then.. let's start the dress down:

Firstly, if you knew anything about Star Trek, you'd know that the FTL used by the federation in that universe doesn't impose any force onto the spacecraft as it generates it's warp field. See the link to learn more.

Secondly, even IF the warp drives in Star Trek exerted a small amount of force upon the ship, you'd only need to create a linkage that is able to support the mass of the ship multiplied by the force being exerted by the warp nacelles as they engage (plus an engineering safety factor). If this was the case, you'd probably be able to still use the linkage shown in the gif because that thing is massive. It looks like its 1-2ft in diameter.

Thirdly, in the scenario where Warp Nacelles exerted force equal to their actual acceleration, literally no material or substance or anything in known science would be able to hold those bad boys in place - no matter where they were placed in the spacecraft. Attached on the side, shoved in the back, it doesn't matter - you and the entire star system you lived in no longer exist as all that matter in your spacecraft is instantly converted to light. Sci-fi is called Science Fiction because we suspend most disbelief because otherwise we'd be stuck in the boring hardspace universe we exist in - where space magic doesn't exist and if you want to travel to the next star system you need a generation ship and hundreds of years. That doesn't really make for a fun universe colonization game.

Fourthly, Star Trek DID hire technical advice support. Andre Bormanis was the science consultant for Star Trek: First Contact, which is where the gif is from. He looks qualified enough just going off his page.

Lastly, your input has no contribution to this actual suggestion, since if the spacecraft designer really cared about physics that much, they'd make their spaceship have a different motion of deployment. I recommend you stop trying to steer this thread off track. I'd like to only hear substantial input on the game suggestion I provided.

[Deantwo]

More options for animation of a spacecraft has been one of the most requested features forever now, right after "make designer easier" requests that is. There are a bunch of idea threads about this.

I am sure it would be possible, just like with landing gear. The biggest issues is with finding out where and how to activate these modes. An animation could be triggered by FTL drive being powered on/off, same with maneuver drive and other spacecraft subsystems.

No real need to argue over realism or whatever. Haxus will probably get around to this some day when he goes back to working on the designer.

[Rockinsince87]

I get what AnrDaemon is talking about. It would be cool to see damage physics and stress physics in the game too. 

Yes that kind of level of customization in animation in the designer would be awesome. 

You could design a proper rotating station for example for fun.

[suunaabas]

This *could* be implemented with 'associate part', rather than having to add other custom UIs and panels. Say for the helm; flipping on the 'grav drives' turns on the contrails and if present+associated, extends some section for wings or engine mounts. Same with PNN / Warp drives being engaged. If you wanted to get fancy, percentage of throttle + time at or above those values could key an action also. I was hoping associating a console with a set of faces could activate its effects channel too, for mining, teleport pads, scanning, firing, and warp. Firing because you could use frame animated textures to fake things like an ammo drum rotating, shells ejecting and fading away, or charge gathering along a plane down the barrel for EWs, etc. Mining, you could glow an assigned mesh, or activate the effects channel there. TP pads could be in their off position without the effects channel active. Warp.. yeah that always looks fun, especially the one from ... damn, what was that horror sci-fi movie with Sam Neil and the ship from Hell? "Where we're going we won't need eyes to see!"

Wanted this with Freelancer too, but always had to resort to the 'eject cargo' or 'cruise mode' functions as the only player-initiated states you could assign an animated mesh to, which was less than optimal. The rest were static, repeating mesh animations, added into the base model with rotational speed, axis, and distance for variables (translation animations were a bit more rare but there and used the same format, just a different hex code). Well, you could also tweak the engine contrails' particle sprites, distribution, and color a bit, and the same with weapon flash +beam / bullet. But those and texture animations added a lot on stations and ships if you got creative. Stations always looked great with some rotating ring with emitters attached to it.