BoH_Havoc
Captain
I had the idea of building an online 3D shipviewer for the wcnews shipdatabase, so i sat down today an created a very basic first version.
Please not that the GUI is horrible (i just wanted to try some things out) and most likely isn't needed at all.
Press and hold the left mouse button to orbit around the ship. Use the mousewheel to zoom in and out.
-> http://www.project-havoc.com/wip/wcshipview/wcshipview.html
Model was done by Klavs
The final goal would be to put the shipview.html in a folder on wcnews.com, then create subfolders for each ship. In these shipfolders there will be an xml file containing all the data from the database (armor, shields, top speed, etc). Additionally there will be an .obj model file containing the ship. As for the textures, diffuse, normalmap, gloss and emissive are supported. If there is a diffuse texture in the folder it will be used, if not, the ship will get a default gray color. Same for the other textures (normalmap will get default 128 128 255, gloss gets 255 and emissive would be 0). That way the 3D database could be slowly build up step by step. If a certain model does not have all texture, only the ones available would be used.
Instead of xml, i could also load up a webpage (i.e. the shipdatabase pages already available) and display it in-engine. This would be a little slower, but has the advantage of copy&paste support.
Now i have already done the xml part in another Unity project of mine and see no problems there (the other project has a pretty advanced xml structure. The shipviewer xml wouldn't be very fancy). As for the on-the-fly obj web importer: I have a plugin laying around doing exactly that, so that shouldn't be a problem either (haven't tested it yet though).
Also I could move this from Unity Webplugin to pure Flash so you wouldn't have to download an extra plugin except flash (which most of you most likely have anyway), but that would cost me some money which i don't have at the moment. A Unity Flash License would be around $400 or $1500 (just a rough guess, the flash exporter is only available as a preview version at the moment and is not officially buyable yet. But the Android and iOS Licenses are also $400 or $1500 so thats where the rough estimate comes from).
Doing a flash version is optional though. The only advantage would be to NOT download the unity plugin if you want to use the shipviewer.
The only thing that's stopping me from finishing this up is this: Would anyone be willing to prepare the needed models for this (remember that the database can be filled step by step)? Theres some in the wcnews.com download section, but not every ship is available. Also, would you guys back this up if i open up a kickstart ( http://www.kickstarter.com/ ) for this to get the needed funds for flash support (remember that this is optional)? And most importantly: Would anyone use it at all?
Alrighty, that's more than enough text for now
[edit] Forgot to mention: The intention of this is not to create another standalone shipviewer, but rather to create a web application that can be easily included whereever you like. Want the viewer in the wcnews shipdatabase? Inlude it. Want to post on the forums and to make your post more clear include some shots of a ship from a specific angle? Inlude the shipviewer in your post along with coordinates for the camera and you're done. The purpose is to have some sort of interactive screenshot that can easily be shared with others.
Please not that the GUI is horrible (i just wanted to try some things out) and most likely isn't needed at all.
Press and hold the left mouse button to orbit around the ship. Use the mousewheel to zoom in and out.
-> http://www.project-havoc.com/wip/wcshipview/wcshipview.html
Model was done by Klavs
The final goal would be to put the shipview.html in a folder on wcnews.com, then create subfolders for each ship. In these shipfolders there will be an xml file containing all the data from the database (armor, shields, top speed, etc). Additionally there will be an .obj model file containing the ship. As for the textures, diffuse, normalmap, gloss and emissive are supported. If there is a diffuse texture in the folder it will be used, if not, the ship will get a default gray color. Same for the other textures (normalmap will get default 128 128 255, gloss gets 255 and emissive would be 0). That way the 3D database could be slowly build up step by step. If a certain model does not have all texture, only the ones available would be used.
Instead of xml, i could also load up a webpage (i.e. the shipdatabase pages already available) and display it in-engine. This would be a little slower, but has the advantage of copy&paste support.
Now i have already done the xml part in another Unity project of mine and see no problems there (the other project has a pretty advanced xml structure. The shipviewer xml wouldn't be very fancy). As for the on-the-fly obj web importer: I have a plugin laying around doing exactly that, so that shouldn't be a problem either (haven't tested it yet though).
Also I could move this from Unity Webplugin to pure Flash so you wouldn't have to download an extra plugin except flash (which most of you most likely have anyway), but that would cost me some money which i don't have at the moment. A Unity Flash License would be around $400 or $1500 (just a rough guess, the flash exporter is only available as a preview version at the moment and is not officially buyable yet. But the Android and iOS Licenses are also $400 or $1500 so thats where the rough estimate comes from).
Doing a flash version is optional though. The only advantage would be to NOT download the unity plugin if you want to use the shipviewer.
The only thing that's stopping me from finishing this up is this: Would anyone be willing to prepare the needed models for this (remember that the database can be filled step by step)? Theres some in the wcnews.com download section, but not every ship is available. Also, would you guys back this up if i open up a kickstart ( http://www.kickstarter.com/ ) for this to get the needed funds for flash support (remember that this is optional)? And most importantly: Would anyone use it at all?
Alrighty, that's more than enough text for now
[edit] Forgot to mention: The intention of this is not to create another standalone shipviewer, but rather to create a web application that can be easily included whereever you like. Want the viewer in the wcnews shipdatabase? Inlude it. Want to post on the forums and to make your post more clear include some shots of a ship from a specific angle? Inlude the shipviewer in your post along with coordinates for the camera and you're done. The purpose is to have some sort of interactive screenshot that can easily be shared with others.
