There's more Pioneer material from Howard Day. First up are five screenshots of the Hydra -- one of the fan game's flyable ships, not a radical redesign of the Nephilim cruiser. He has also released 'fly around' .MOV files of the new Hydra (41 mb) and classic Tarsus (23 mb) ships. -- Original update published on March 29, 2007
The Hydra looks quite nice. What kind of interface can we see in the movie and which software is used?
That's XNormal's interface. http://santy.xnormal.net/ it's a free download, so it's perfect for anyone who'd like to take a look at a 3d model of your choice real-time. I believe it accepts most 3d formats. Anyhow - Each ship is using a combination of 5 different maps, all at a resolution of 1024x1024. These are palletized and compressed as much as possible, to keep the memory required low. For example, the Phalanx only uses 3MB of texture space. if these textures we not compressed and palletized, it would take closer to 12MB on the video card. This might not seem like much of a savings, but when we take into account that some players might only have a 64MB video card we see that we need to be as frugal as possible. This is especially important when the texture of the Camel come into play - they're 2048x2048. Uncompressed that's 64MB by itself! Compressed, they're only 6MB, so you can see why we're doing it. Also, there are two more videos up for grabs: http://www.hedfiles.net/wcpioneer/Phalanx3d.mov http://www.hedfiles.net/wcpioneer/Camel3d.mov Both are compressed with Sorensen 3, and are 17 and 23 MB respectively. Enjoy!
Status? How exactly do you mean? It's not the low-end ship, if that's what you're alluding to. It preforms the Long-range explorer role in the game. As far as we're able, it will have the identical stats as the one in the original Privateer.
Ditto. You're a great artist and all, but I just don't have a reason to *care* about the new ships (yet)... the Tarsus is the treat.
I know where you guys are coming from. Whenever we release the playable demo, the flyable ship will be the Tarsus. Just doesn't seem right to do it otherwise.
Same as what Vinman said. I just really like the Tarsus in general. Hell, it was the only ship I used in Rightrous Fire (thank god for those extra upgrade levels).
One more! http://www.hedfiles.net/wcpioneer/Jalthi3d.mov (22MB) As requested by Plasteel Skull. Anyone else have a request?
Is it possible to make a 3d video thingy (not sure what to call it, but it's really cool!) of the base, showing off some different modules?
