Does anybody know how Matt Burch managed to get the Ships in EV to rotate so smoothly with only 36 picts? that's a 10° turn every pict and in EV it looks a lot smoother than that. i want to know because I'm doing some programming stuff myself and when i try ten degree turns it doesn't come out anywhere near as smooth.
I realise that you might not be able to help but if you can, please do!
Thx,
Mar Tar
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I axrewed up a bit when I made my first and did not have the right number of frames set in the shan. Once I had that fixed the ship ran fine.
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It has to do with the rate of rotation. If it has a high enough rate of degrees per second, it will spin smoothly. If, however, it has something low, it sucks. That's it.
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Originally posted by orcaloverbri9:
**It has to do with the rate of rotation. If it has a high enough rate of degrees per second, it will spin smoothly. If, however, it has something low, it sucks. That's it.
**
Yep.
I dont htink theres any magic here. It would look worse as the turning speed decreases and sprite size increases. Thats why larger ships have 64 frames.
-Az
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Originally posted by Azratax2:
**Yep.
I dont htink theres any magic here. It would look worse as the turning speed decreases and sprite size increases. Thats why larger ships have 64 frames.
-Az **
Actually, sometimes they're so friggin' huge that it goes to 72 and maybe (or, since it's you, mabey :p) even more. I suppose the Death Star, for example, would probably have to have more than 72 frames if possible.
I'd just like to see one with 144. That would be cool. 
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I certainly don't have any direct knowledge about Burch's programming methods, but perhaps you'd get some insights from looking at a rotation-related chink in his generally excellent engine design. See this thread:
(url="http://"http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/webboard/Forum9/HTML/004564.html")EVN Wiggling Ships(/url)
Inertia-less ships -- and only inertia-less ships -- wiggle when they approach planets if they have more than 36 frames.
Maybe ships with inertia (and that's most of them) have only 36 thrust-firing orientations, and that improves the apparent smoothness of their movements: the direction of travel isn't necessarily the direction the ship faces, so rotations can always end on an even 10-degree "mark."
Edit: I doubt I got that quite right. More likely: All ships have a number of thrust positions equal to the number of frames in the sprite. For ships with inertia, there are smoothly ending rotations because it doesn't matter whether the ship is facing exactly in its direction of travel. For ships without inertia, there is trouble when approaching spobs because they have to aim themselves exactly at the spob even if the angle between the ship and the spob isn't divisible by 10. But then that doesn't explain why inertialess ships don't wiggle if they have 36 frames..... OK, that's all I've got; I fold. Good luck!
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(This message has been edited by Dr. Trowel (edited 01-01-2004).)
(This message has been edited by Dr. Trowel (edited 01-01-2004).)
It also has to do with the ratio of length to witdh in the ship design. The more this ratio approaches 1/1, like on the confed frigate for example, the less strobing can be seen. When things get more than about 3/1, 36 frames can seem a bit jerky. The bigger they are, the less you can push the ratio. This is something true in all animation, which is why things like Jack Skellington (of Nightmare Before Christmas fame) are so hard to move smoothly.
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Originally posted by marjock:
Ok thx guys, and what would be mammoth but SO smooth is 360 frames, one for each degree o.O
Why not go further? 720 frames, each .5°... 
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It would be 30', then (remember: one degree is split in 60 minutes, and each minute is 60 seconds).
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Just think of this for a sec: file size. In order to keep things moving smoothly in-game, Nova has to keep all the ship sprites in RAM (I imagine). If the sprite size exceeds a certain size, I'm pretty sure Nova will crash. Besides, that kind of rotation wouldn't even be perceptible to the human eye, so what would be the point?
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There is also the resource fork length limit and the maximum size for PICT files to consider.
1.) The Mac resource fork has a certain size limit, I believe it is 15 megs or something... Quite the oversight by Apple (Of course, back when it was written, it was nearly inconceivable to have files that large... 
).
2.) A PICT cannot be larger than 32767 pixels squared or so. Rlë's don't have this problem, but unless you want to write out your rlë's by hand, I'd keep to using EnRLE.
That said, I wouldn't try it. 36 frames works well enough for most ships.
~ SpacePirate
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Quote
Originally posted by SpacePirate:
**There is also the resource fork length limit and the maximum size for PICT files to consider.
1.) The Mac resource fork has a certain size limit, I believe it is 15 megs or something... Quite the oversight by Apple (Of course, back when it was written, it was nearly inconceivable to have files that large... ).
2.) A PICT cannot be larger than 32767 pixels squared or so. Rlë's don't have this problem, but unless you want to write out your rlë's by hand, I'd keep to using EnRLE.
That said, I wouldn't try it. 36 frames works well enough for most ships.
~ SpacePirate
**
It might work on Windows. Windows doesn't have a 15 megabyte limit to files. It's probably true that QuickDraw wouldn't like PICTs larger than what you said, but that doesn't matter so much. EVNEW can handle rle8s and rleDs as large as you can hold in memory. Of course, just because it might be possible, that doesn't mean you should do it. Who's going to want to download 50 megabytes for an ultra-smoothly animated giant ship?
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Originally posted by Aprosenf:
It might work on Windows. Windows doesn't have a 15 megabyte limit to files. It's probably true that QuickDraw wouldn't like PICTs larger than what you said, but that doesn't matter so much. EVNEW can handle rle8s and rleDs as large as you can hold in memory. Of course, just because it might be possible, that doesn't mean you should do it. Who's going to want to download 50 megabytes for an ultra-smoothly animated giant ship?
Well, I can think of a couple ships that big...Death Star, Borg Cubes, to a lesser extent Star Destroyers...
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Well, 50 megabytes times 5 classes of Star Destroyers, 1 Mon Cal Cruiser (which is just slightly smaller), and 2 Death Stars gets to be kind of big, unmanageable, and...you know, you don't want to have to write in the read-me 'Place all the files from Plug-in Ships 1' to 'Plug-in Ships 204' in the Nova Files folder'.
Of course, it also depends on how often you see said giant ships and how much smaller, less smooth files detract from gameplay.
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Originally posted by UE_Research & Development:
Well, 50 megabytes times 5 classes of Star Destroyers, 1 Mon Cal Cruiser (which is just slightly smaller), and 2 Death Stars gets to be kind of big, unmanageable, and...you know, you don't want to have to write in the read-me 'Place all the files from Plug-in Ships 1' to 'Plug-in Ships 204' in the Nova Files folder'.
There's only 5 classes? Wow. Anyhow, can't forget the Star Cruiser!
You know, I look at the website for SWN and find myself wondering about how the hell the Rebels eber hoped to win.
Why is it that in Science Fiction, the good guy is always the weakling?
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Why is it that in Science Fiction, the good guy is always the weakling?
Because military commanders who say, "Our Legions of Death have conquered every planet in the universe, we have a fleet strong enough to go up against itself and still emerge completely victorious, and...oh, yeah, we're the good guys too!" tend to make a story kind of dull :p.
The Rebels killed the Emperor, (in a way) Darth Vader, and a whole lot of other Imperial officers when they blew up the Death Star II. Even so, if you read the books that are supposed to take place after Return of the Jedi , it's stated that the Rebels (and their New Republic) had a hard time holding the galaxy together against the remnants of the Empire. Of course, purists could always say that the books aren't a true source, but they're about as close to canon as you can get (even if they do contradict the Star Wars prequels) :).
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(quote)Originally posted by UE_Research & Development:
**Because military commanders who say, "Our Legions of Death have conquered every planet in the universe, we have a fleet strong enough to go up against itself and still emerge completely victorious, and...oh, yeah, we're the good guys too!" tend to make a story kind of dull:)
(quote)The Rebels killed the Emperor, (in a way) Darth Vader, and a whole lot of other Imperial officers when they blew up the Death Star II. Even so, if you read the books that are supposed to take place after Return of the Jedi , it's stated that the Rebels (and their New Republic) had a hard time holding the galaxy together against the remnants of the Empire. Of course, purists could always say that the books aren't a true source, but they're about as close to canon as you can get (even if they do contradict the Star Wars prequels) 
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**
