I noticed that on some of the bigger and slower ships, like the leviathan and to some extent the mantcore, the turning is slow enough that the choppiness between the turning sprites is rather obvious. Now, i'm wanting to make my own really big hulking battleship to put in the game, and wanted it to be somewhat mroe graceful, if still slow, so I was wondering if the game still works fine if you had a 8x8 or 9x8 grid of sprites for the ship with smaller increments between the turn angles.

Yep, as far as I know, it does. Just as long as the PICT doesn't get too big, and by too big I mean that it'll fit within the 14-or-so megabyte limit on Mac OS files' resource forks.

Yeah, the only limitation is the ram limitation of the computer you run it on, and the fact that a single plugin file cant be larger than 16 megs i think. The engine fully supports more frames per turn, i think the leviathan might even use a few more. Maybe 72? Well... possibly not. But its definately doable.

Hmm... on a kinda related note, is the direction of the weapons fire from a ship based at all on the direction of the ship sprite... i.e. would a ship with only images for up down left and right only be able to fire those directions, or is that something independant?

Keldor Sarn, on May 16 2005, 05:43 PM, said:

Hmm... on a kinda related note, is the direction of the weapons fire from a ship based at all on the direction of the ship sprite... i.e. would a ship with only images for up down left and right only be able to fire those directions, or is that something independant?
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Yes and no.
Ordinary projectile weapons will fire in the direction of the true heading of the ship, while beams will fire in the direction that the sprite is pointing- in this case, up and down. Interestingly, the direction that recoil comes from is always from half-way through the angles for which a given sprite appears- in the case of the two-frame ship, recoil would come from left and right. (I'm sorry, I've tried several times now, but I can't come up with a clear wording for this. For a pictoral explaination, go to this thread.)

Edwards

The Leviathan has 64 base sprites, with another set or two that alternate so as to give the cargo containers that rotating look. Titan is based on those 64 base sprites, and hence, has no rotating containers.

This post has been edited by erikthered : 17 May 2005 - 01:20 AM