The RLE'd files are up there now.

Lastly, here's a sort of "taste" of the new shipyard, in terms of quality (all sorts of different styles will be present):

I call it a "bluebird". Here is a bigger, quad-view. More to come soon!

...

...

...wow.

Edwards

Wow. That's really nice, Onyx. May I ask what program you're using? I'm trying to decide on my own. And have you ever thought of making tutorials?

@dr-neverhood, on Aug 18 2006, 10:54 PM, said in Onyx's shipyard:

Wow. That's really nice, Onyx. May I ask what program you're using? I'm trying to decide on my own. And have you ever thought of making tutorials?

Made with Lightwave. After having tried several other programs (3DSMax, Maya, Modo), I keep coming back to Lightwave 'cause I'm most comfortable with it.

The packages I mentioned above are all pretty much equally capable, and I've seen amazing things come from each of them. Try as many as you need to, looking for something that feels comfortable and works well for you; basically if you feel like you're fighting with the interface to get what you want done, it may be time to look for something else.

Don't let the tool choose you, though: there's a lot of marketing hype out there, a lot of competition for your hard-earned dollars. It's spawned heaps of fierce brand loyalty, unfortunately, through which you'll wade waist-deep in enthusiast forums. Keep a level head, especially if you're spending money.

As for tutorials, I am producing a general shipwrighting design-guide, though it doesn't cover specific techniques or progess in a step-by-step fashion. There's plently of good tutorials specific to various 3D packages, and you can learn most of the important techniques (especially modelling) there. Later on I may make short tutorials on "tricks" and "cheats" I've developed.

This post has been edited by Onyx : 19 August 2006 - 01:31 AM

You freak me out, man. That's nuts.

I just love all the details. I am very inspired right now.

This post has been edited by modesty_blaise_us : 19 August 2006 - 07:39 AM

Wow. Onyx, well done on that bluebird.

Now that is a distinctive ship. Very different from anything I've ever seen associated with EV.

If you move the center of rotation somewhat towards the nose when you spin it for a sprite, it will turn by swinging its tail -- as if the ship somehow generated a force flowing sideways through that myterious ring. I don't know how good that would look in-game, but it might be worth trying out.

Ships spinning around any point other than thier centers take up a lot more space thanks to all of the black space that is left when the rotational end of the ship leaves the area. Try it, that's kind of a vague point I made there. Or it takes a lot more detailed animation to keep the ship always in a square bounding box.

@dr--trowel, on Aug 19 2006, 12:13 PM, said in Onyx's shipyard:

Now that is a distinctive ship. Very different from anything I've ever seen associated with EV.

If you move the center of rotation somewhat towards the nose when you spin it for a sprite, it will turn by swinging its tail -- as if the ship somehow generated a force flowing sideways through that myterious ring. I don't know how good that would look in-game, but it might be worth trying out.

To see how this looks, try looking at the sprite for Ptolemy class ships with the KeyCarried pods. Rather...well, odd. It looks fine as long as it's not selected, in which case there's a huge black box, most of which has nothing in it.

Now that is an awesome ship...
I think i might try lightwave, i use starta 3d right now. As with Onyx, I have 3ds max and i tried it, but I hate it. Cant do anything in it....other than a particle cannon.

@rmx256, on Aug 20 2006, 05:11 AM, said in Onyx's shipyard:

Ships spinning around any point other than thier centers take up a lot more space thanks to all of the black space that is left when the rotational end of the ship leaves the area.

Not really. As long as you're using EnRLE rather than MC then all that black will just get compressed away.

Oh it'll rotate around it's geometric center, not center of mass. The camera angle exaggerates that long tail a little bit, 'cause the sprite looks pretty okay and not unbalanced in the least. Engine glows let you know which way you're pointing.

I'm gonna do a couple more and release them as an initial batch, which will include the re-vamped Nebu, Jaguar, and Ringtail-thing I made a couple years back. After that it will be the Shipwright's Handbook, as I've just now decided it will be called, and for the next ship I'll make a detailed tutorial as I make it, probably including false starts and design changes/on-the-fly revisions so you can see how and why I do what I do. The final phase will be me adding a ship whenever a ship is made, likely on no particular schedule. Maybe some matched sets at that stage, who knows.

Thanks for the continued interest, all!

This post has been edited by Onyx : 19 August 2006 - 07:59 PM

@guy, on Aug 19 2006, 07:25 PM, said in Onyx's shipyard:

Not really. As long as you're using EnRLE rather than MC then all that black will just get compressed away.

EnRLE is sooooo slow... Took a 252 frame sprite over six hours to encode.

@onyx, on Aug 19 2006, 05:56 PM, said in Onyx's shipyard:

I'm gonna do a couple more and release them as an initial batch, which will include the re-vamped Nebu, Jaguar, and Ringtail-thing I made a couple years back. After that it will be the Shipwright's Handbook, as I've just now decided it will be called, and for the next ship I'll make a detailed tutorial as I make it, probably including false starts and design changes/on-the-fly revisions so you can see how and why I do what I do. The final phase will be me adding a ship whenever a ship is made, likely on no particular schedule. Maybe some matched sets at that stage, who knows.

Thanks for the continued interest, all!

Sounds awesome, your graphics look so much better than mine, and I'm no good at making giant ships, only small ones the size of a starbridge. Can't wait to get my hands on them....

@rmx256, on Aug 19 2006, 06:10 PM, said in Onyx's shipyard:

EnRLE is sooooo slow... Took a 252 frame sprite over six hours to encode.

Lol, that is one of hte only reasons why windows is better than mac.(atleast for EVN ) It took a 10mb sprite and loaded it in in about 42 seconds. I ended up deleting it anyways, the sprtie ended up crashing Nova. :laugh:

This post has been edited by chronodrago : 19 August 2006 - 08:25 PM

Uh, I think you're failing to take into account the respective ages of yours and rmx's computers. rmx has a pretty old compy - I really don't think EVNEW can encode any faster than MC can, on same spec machines.

rmx: Even with MC it shouldn't matter too much since the compressed form of your plug will still be just as small.

That's astonishing. For me, EnRLE has always run lighting fast on any hardware I've used it on. B&W G3/400 tower, Single-proc G4 tower, Twin G4 and Dual-core G5.

It converted, say, the Raven sprite in about 10 seconds. I used to use it to batch a dozen sprites at once, and it'd be done before I could blink.

Wow, this is really great. Thanks Rmx, Dr. Trowel, and Onyx for getting everything up again!

On my 8500/G3/350 with 640 meg allocated to EnRLE, it took something like six hours and ten minutes to encode a 252 total frame, seven base sets 300*360 RLE. MissionComputer Tends to benchmark with my sprites in less than half an hour on the same hardware, and now under ten minutes on my 9500/G3/900 mhz with the same ram footprint and equivalent sprite sizes et all. Yes I know that most of my sprites are too big.

If you are fiddling with memory allocation for your apps, it sounds like you are running OS 9. I no longer remember how fast EnRLE ran on that OS. Was early adoption of OS X part of what got ATMOS written up on Apple's web site years ago?

Are you...

• using a slow 3rd-party hard drive?
• using an incredibly fragmented hard drive?
• giving EnRLE too much memory relative to your total physical RAM, so that your Mac is forced to swap memory to your hard drive to do system tasks?