Wow, I haven't thought about Delphi in a while, but this memory module idea is getting me excited again. Does the software incompatibility mean that civilian ships will have their own type of memory as well? Memory modules could also be a cool trade resource. You could smuggle NDC modules to Enclave worlds or vice versa.

I concur with everything above this post. Keep up the awesomeness, Delphi.

Also, for the record, NAEV already beat you to the memory system idea.

@darthkev, on 13 November 2011 - 01:53 AM, said in EVN - Delphi:

I concur with everything above this post. Keep up the awesomeness, Delphi.

Also, for the record, NAEV already beat you to the memory system idea.

Oh, I never wanted to claim credit for that. There have been plenty of different RPG approaches to determining a character's maximum capacities. Many RPGs use encumbrance to determine spell effectiveness, and EVE Online even has a computer strength measurement that determines the level of complexity of installed systems. I just realized that Nova's two determining ship factors were weapons and cargo mass no matter the TC, and I wanted to do something different for a change. It's not unique, but it's definitely one of the first times I've seen it put to use in the Nova engine. Sometimes changing the way a game behaves/plays all comes down to redefining a scale or definition that appears commonly in the game.

If in a fantasy RPG you changed encumbrance to be "tribbles", you are now effectively spending the game trying to keep your tribble count lower so you can cast spells through the perceived fluffiness. It's a sort of mad-lib approach that completely changes the way you play the game, even though nothing has really changed, mechanically speaking. By changing the ship mass measurement in Delphi to available memory/processing power, it changes the way people picture the building of their ships, and also changes the way the calculations are done.

Just for clarification, here's two similar examples, but with drastically different results according to what each measurement means:

1. Stock Nova (Mass measurement)
Gun - 5 tons
Missile Jammer - 1 ton

2. Delphi (CPU measurement)
Gun - 2 complexity units
Missile Jammer - 5 complexity units

Just by changing the definition and adjusting the numbers, you suddenly have a whole new system of ship balancing. It makes sense now that a seemingly small component can still have high requirements, depending on its sophistication. Guns will be cheap but ships always still have strict maximum limits, while advanced systems are expensive and difficult to balance. A ship captain may actually find better results by trimming out weapon systems in favor of advanced shield generators and jamming technology that his adversary is unlikely to have. A ship with nothing but pure weapons will almost always invariably fail against any ship larger in hull class.

I know it feels like an eternity since the last big progress update, but I've just been really busy with the Christmas season. I got solid work done on tailoring the "new" upgrade system mentioned in my last post, it's just that walls of text and the charts I'm using to compare them don't really make for good screenshots, especially since the process is only about halfway done, meaning that almost all of the figures I could post would be completely incorrect compared to final values.

Suffice it to say, the project is still very much alive and well. Hope you folks enjoyed your Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanza/Festivus and had a good New Year's Eve!

@delphi, on 08 January 2012 - 12:49 PM, said in EVN - Delphi:

Suffice it to say, the project is still very much alive and well. Hope you folks enjoyed your Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanza/Festivus and had a good New Year's Eve!

Good to know.

But, why don't you hope we had a good New Year's Day?

So I lied. Turns out I had it in me yesterday to create a new ship. I stumbled onto one of my old model files and realized it was a design I'd completely forgotten about. I performed the render of the model, but I left it on my external HD (my Snow Leopard boot volume).

But yeah, it'll be this one:

I'll post a colour image at home after work when I reconnect the hard drive.

Anyone else see a similarity to my Axe-tail Interceptor?

Yes, now that you mention it. At the same time, though, both also use the same 'arm' piece as wings of sorts.

I assure you that any resemblance is purely coincidental. Unless you made the model before May 9th, 2010.

Who knows; could be clairvoyance. I personally think that the majority of creative model designers out there are so sick of this...

(Russian MiG-15)

...that they're all turning the wings forward to make things like this:

(Stargate SG-1 X-302 Fighter)

- - - - - - - - - -

Anyway, I'm also re-detailing the Cephecon model to make it a bit more complicated-looking. I'm not entirely pleased with the "wings" at the back, but I'm even less happy with them removed. I'll do a few test renders to see how it actually looks when all is said and done.

@delphi, on 23 January 2012 - 08:30 PM, said in EVN - Delphi:

Anyway, I'm also re-detailing the Cephecon model to make it a bit more complicated-looking. I'm not entirely pleased with the "wings" at the back, but I'm even less happy with them removed. I'll do a few test renders to see how it actually looks when all is said and done.

It seems like the back end needs more mass - either by making the wings huge (like a Ferengi Marauder - at least, I think that's what their ships are called) or adding more engines or something. Or perhaps shrinking the front end if you don't want the ship to appear more massive.

I respectfully disagree. I think the problem is the wings don't look complicated enough. You can plainly see the wings, at their core, are simply four pieces, two if the count the fact it's just the Archon Fin and Plate copied once each. Try adding more detail to the wings. Doesn't have to be actual greebling, just add some lines, maybe the NDC insignia somewhere.

I'm still a fairly huge fan of the original "levitating plates" design you introduced to us in page 11. The "plates" just seem to compliment the rear portion of the ship the best; I think it's because in my humble opinion, they added a level of sleekness that couldn't be achieved by just leaving the engines exposed (which you aren't pleased with either) or by attaching wings.

That being said, I think our judgments so far could change if we saw the completed render. I'll be fine with whatever you decide on; I'd just like to give an honest opinion to make one of my favorite ships look nicer.

I made a new ship! In the Delphi storyline there is an era after the end of the NDC-Enclave war in which the two sides of humanity are finally reunited and begin developing in parallel. As a result, their ships begin to share features of both technological backgrounds. Here's a frigate from such a combination.

It's like the IDA Frigate and Nebulon-B Frigate got married and had a miracle child. I love it!

And, correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like it has a visible bridge on the front. There's an indentation at the frontmost area that looks like it could be home to a large window. Or a forcefield protecting a launch bay.

@darthkev, on 16 February 2012 - 09:09 PM, said in EVN - Delphi:

It's like the IDA Frigate and Nebulon-B Frigate got married and had a miracle child. I love it!

And, correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like it has a visible bridge on the front. There's an indentation at the frontmost area that looks like it could be home to a large window. Or a forcefield protecting a launch bay.

I had the idea that it would be part of the primary docking gantry. The ship couples with a station face-first, and the front opens up to allow direct access to the cargo bays that run the length of the ship's middle decks. A little bit like the loading bays at large stores, and the way they serve large trucks.

Ah, so similar to the Enterprise and Auroran Cruiser in EVN. Remember seeing little slits on the front of each? That wasn't a bridge, either. You can see both docking face-first in some Auroran landing images on space stations. Lemme see if I can find them...

There we are. Notice how the Enterprise and Auroran Cruiser dock to the stations in these images.

Now take a look at the front of both ships here. Small openings that are likely the point-of-entry when docking to stations. Personally I think the system is rather ingenious, and in turn proves Aurorans are more than brutish savages for having thought it up.

I did some modifications to that new frigate model. The tail-end looked really glued together with those almost outboard engines strapped to it, and it just looked odd when viewed from the overhead angle used in Nova. I've done some tweaking to make it more appealing. Fins are always good; right, guys?

I'll render it as soon as I find the time. One of the biggest things that was slowing down production is that after upgrading my computer to Mac OS X Lion, I could no longer run Bryce (my renderer) without booting back into Snow Leopard first. I had Snow Leopard on an external drive, but it was just such a hassle connecting it every time and then trying to balance the whole thing on my lap (I use a laptop). However, I recently purchased a nice little 16 GB USB stick, and cloned my bootable Snow Leopard partition onto it. I know that booting from USB is slower, but the program should run just fine once I'm actually in the system and using my regular hard drive as the storage location for the software and the models.

In truth, the fins at the back of the model are more true to the original design I had in my head, which would have featured a long, trailing sensor array that the ship sort of drags through space like a big rake. When I made the model with that design, though, it just looked ridiculous, and I realized that the array wouldn't even appear in the final render because of the zoom distance/sprite size.

@delphi, on 22 February 2012 - 02:03 PM, said in EVN - Delphi:

. . . after upgrading my computer to Mac OS X Lion, I could no longer run Bryce (my renderer) without booting back into Snow Leopard first.

Is this because your copy of Bryce isn’t Intel-native? Because the latest version is being given away free until the end of February.

Just a quick question, Delph: you did say that the Echavius was actually made by the Enclave first, but then the NDC attempted constructing their own version. Judging by this post:

@delphi, on 16 June 2011 - 07:21 PM, said in EVN - Delphi:

The ship's effectiveness was eventually understood by NDC architects, so they went to great pains attempting to capture even just basic layout schematics of the craft for their own use. As a result, the Enclave and NDC variants are completely different in shields, armor, and armament.

I'm going to assume that the NDC's version is also dissimilar in appearance. Is this true?

(read: did you make a model for the NDC Echavius yet? :p)

@king_of_manticores, on 18 March 2012 - 12:29 PM, said in EVN - Delphi:

I'm going to assume that the NDC's version is also dissimilar in appearance. Is this true?

(read: did you make a model for the NDC Echavius yet? :p)

I've not yet made a model for the NDC version, but it'll be on the way. The shared ships between factions are actually difficult to produce, because the texturing and rendering is done in Bryce. If I make the model geometry different in SketchUp, it's really difficult to translate all of the textures to what Bryce interprets as a whole new model. As a result, I've been primarily doing the geometry modifications in Bryce itself, which is something of a time-consuming process.

I hope this makes up for it, though:

The Mining Armature is a universally-used mining craft capable of hauling immense amounts of ore. The large arms on the front of the vessel are fitted with powerful gravitational tethers that both physically and energetically hold a mass in place while short-range graviton beams at the core of the vessel pulverize the ore and feed it into the backpack-like carrying module at the aft of the vessel. However, in these darker times, there has been nothing preventing this powerful vehicle's capabilities from being used on smaller vessels. These modified hull-breaking nightmares are known by some as "can openers", for their ability to literally shred ships up to the size of a medium cruiser, before inhaling all of the scrap metal, supplies... and corpses.