Home sweet cockpit

Eder

Mr. Standoff
Home sweet cockpits

Here's a preview of the first near-complete cockpit strut in Standoff (I think these might also be the first 1024x768 screenshots of the mod to be published anywhere, but don't quote me on that).

stilcp1.png


stilcp2.png


That's the Stiletto's cockpit in the campaign, and it'll double as the Morningstar's cockpit in the simulator... oh, and just for the record, those shots are from the Prologue's first mission, so the background you see there is our version of the Nexus system.

Feedback's welcome, as usual... except if you're going to bitch about the cockpit having low visibility - that's a feature, and part of the whole "what if we made a game like WC2, except different" thing we have going. :p

(Cockpit struts can be turned off by the player at any time, anyway)

Thanks to our friend Blackwolf from the Macross mod team for helping me figure out how cockpit struts work.
 
That looks great.
I like the WC2 feel you guys have given to it, but with the low visibility of the stiletto (and I'm assuming the Sabre and a few others), those crossharis could be taking up way too much real estate in a high-res environment. My 2 cents would be to either make them thinner, or even better, have an option to change the crosshairs to something a little less obstructive.

Edit: The more I look at those crosshairs, the more I like them though. Oh well, I'll leave my suggestion ;).

C-ya
 
Viper61 said:
That looks great.
I like the WC2 feel you guys have given to it, but with the low visibility of the stiletto (and I'm assuming the Sabre and a few others), those crossharis could be taking up way too much real estate in a high-res environment.
Actually, it would work the other way around - big crosshairs look even bigger on low-res environments... but that's no problem either, since we use a smaller crosshair for 640x480 and 800x800. Most of the 1024x768 overlays are higher-res versions of the ones used for the other two resolutions.
 
Excellent job, again!

If I had to change anything in that cockpit, though, I´d make the radar dots bigger, they are too small compared to the radar´s size.
 
Looks good, except that all of the readouts appear to be so massive. But, you're in charge, (unless you mean in the actual game, in which case, I'm the one barking out orders to the player).
 
That's good to know, Bob. :p

Starkey said:
If I had to change anything in that cockpit, though, I´d make the radar dots bigger, they are too small compared to the radar´s size.
We can't do that, though, at least not without some more of HCl's magic. The dots remain unresized from their original sizes in the 640x480 screen, as in all other stuff that uses HCl's high-res patch... it's just that instead of making the readouts a fixed size like in UE, I resized them so that the screen looks more or less the same in all resolutions. Therefore 1024x768 = big radar with small dots.

That's also the reason the crosshair and all other stuff might look massive, but I prefer this way to the UE way... I didn't like playing UE in 1024x768, personally. The HUD was a bunch of small gauges scattered all over the screen, with too much empty space between them. Felt like icons on a desktop :p
 
Looks great! I agree with the notion that there could be an optional less-intruse crosshair. Not that the WC2 retro look doesn't have its value.

Yeah, the big radar might be better than the small radar on 1024X768.
 
Hmm . . . even though it'd be extra work, what about having the option of large or small guages? Even with my new machine, I don't use the hi-res settings.
 
That's way fricken cool!!! Eder you ROCK! Good job!

My only complaints would be the HUD displays seem big and distracting... if only they could be made smaller? The center reticle seems really thick too heh.

But everything else looks gweat!
 
I think one of the reasons everyone's thinking things are too big is the massive contrast you get using WC2 style colours for the guages...

Anyway, I love it, it's beautiful. Despite that, is there any way you can anti-alias the four armour quadrants a bit? That's the only thing that really jumped out at me.

Love the struts.
 
Very very nice shot.
IMHO Radar, Shield Display and Crosshair look too massive, especially in comparision to the left MFD however. The size is kinda ok, but I'd use thinner lines (or a bit transparency for the shield display)
 
Could you map the gauges to the cockpit bitmap so it seems like they are actually attached to the cockpit?
 
I wouldn't say it's impossible... It would just take some serious programming to do it. Probably create a way to do it from scratch.
 
cff said:
Very very nice shot.
IMHO Radar, Shield Display and Crosshair look too massive, especially in comparision to the left MFD however. The size is kinda ok, but I'd use thinner lines (or a bit transparency for the shield display)

Transparency would be nice. But I think that it looks good just the way it is. Yeah, it's big, but it's just like it was back on WC2.
 
Cam said:
I wouldn't say it's impossible... It would just take some serious programming to do it. Probably create a way to do it from scratch.
It's taken HCl a couple of months now only to implement us a launcher with all the settings the UE launcher had, which is stuff he coded over a year ago. The guy's busy, I mean REALLY busy... And seeing as how he is the only guy who seems to have what it takes to make this engine work better, any reprogramming of the engine beyond what we have at this stage may not be impossible, but won't be considered by us...

TC said:
Anyway, I love it, it's beautiful. Despite that, is there any way you can anti-alias the four armour quadrants a bit? That's the only thing that really jumped out at me.
I was waiting for someone to comment on that. I'm still pondering wheter they look bad enough to require a higher-res overlay... I've been avoiding it like the plague since they use a weird mapping compared to the rest of the overlays, and I might have to change something in all the cockpit files for 1024x768 (instead of just changing one texture) but seeing as how it's noticeable, I'll end up redoing it (if I don't have time to do it before the Prologue's release, since it's not top priority after all, it'll be one of the fixes for the Main Campaign)

overmortal said:
Hmm . . . even though it'd be extra work, what about having the option of large or small guages?
We'd probably need an extra switch in the installer, to toggle between using smallgauges.tre or biggauges.tre - since switches in the installer are things that only HCl can do, I'd say that really is too much trouble to be worth it :p
overmortal said:
Even with my new machine, I don't use the hi-res settings.
Then you shouldn't worry, these big-ass gauges won't be used in the 640x480 screen.

I'm not sure why everyone is thinking that the gauges are too big... They're the same size relative to your screen's total size as the gauges in WCP/SO (or Standoff and UE when running in 640x480). They are only larger when compared to the text, but it was either that or the UE method of making everything too small compared to the screen's total size. Here are comparative screenshots, taken in both resolutions then resized to 320x240:

small1.png

small2.png


If I had a screenshot of UE running at 1024x768, resized to 320x240, you'd see how the gauges are small and how there's just too much emptiness between them... which is what I wanted to avoid in Standoff, hence I chose to make the gauges larger relative to the text, but have them occupy the same percentual area of the screen on all resolutions.
 
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