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How do you think you will handle the mech variation of the jet?
I have several ideas, but wonder what yours was.
This is something that I've thought about quite a bit . . . . because, HEY , what's Robotech without the robots / mecha anyhow? Right? I've nosed through the shan resource a little and here is what I feel might be possible with the current EVN engine . . .
- the method that I thought might be cool for introducing the transformability would be to use the extra sprite frames to animate the mech transforming using the fold/unfold flag. The veritech would transform into battloid (mech) mode right after you emerged from hyperspace and would change back to a fighter / aircraft when you folded out of a system. . . .
PROS -
1.) You get to use battloid mode and fly around in a giant mech blasting battle pods left and right in a glorious orgy of destruction. =D
2.) You would actually get to see the transformation happen, which would be really cool to watch especially if a whole squad came out of hyperspace and transformed at the same time.
CONS -
1.) You don't get to fly the fighter around in it's aircrafty form, which IMHO is just as cool as the battloid. . . . well. Maybe not quite as cool.
1a.) Coupled with the fact that you wouldn't be able fly the fighter, the cool bank thing that EVN does wouldn't be able to be used because the sprites would be taken up by the animation. This could also cause problems with the engine-glow sprites since the engines wouldn't be in the same place all the time.
2.) It might be taxing on the engine to have so a whole lot of frames of animation for the transformation (36 x 9 or 10 frames). Not to mention the amount of work that would go into animating, rendering out and organizing all of those frames. Although I do have plans that might make this not too much of a bitch, if I wanted to create all of the transformable mecha (alpha and beta veritechs and the ones seen in Macross Plus) this chore gets multiplied a bunch of times . . . Not that I wouldn't want to do this work, but it would mean that everyone would have to wait quite a bit longer for the plug to be released.
- The only other ways to handle this that I can think of would be to have the ships be all one way or the other. This would obviously make everything much more simple and would alleviate the problems with engine glow. This would also leave sprites open for the banking thing.
If anyone has any other ideas or things that I probably overlooked in my hasty jaunt through the bible/resources please feel free to chime in at any point , , ,
Maybe I could start some sort of poll as to whether or not being able to fly a mech would be important or not to people who would want to play the plug . . .?
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(This message has been edited by uthuan (edited 05-23-2002).)
