Quick Look at a Pre-Alpha WIP Station

Battlescape
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I’m suprised this wasn’t posted here yet. Good to see this one, looks awesome. Can’t wait to get myself in game and explore it all! :smiley:

Now obviously i’ll have to throw in my nitpicks:

  • Station shadow transitions on the cockpit seem binary, would it be possible to add either “real” transitions or perhaps a fake terminator sliding across the cockpit? I’m sure this is already plannet, was just wondering.

  • Lights on the station seem to be very WIP which is normal, i wanted to ask what are the artistic plans for station surfaces: are you going to make it just randomised greble, a static mix of textures or are you going to simulate, say, a skyscraper office building window lights procedurally (so each station looks different at any time).

  • There seems to be a blue global iluminating light across the station in areas it should be dark/black in specific exposure settings, is something like this going to remain for gameplay purposes or are we actually going to get “realistic” lighting in the future and bumping into stations because of an unfortunate viewing angle is going to be a thing? If it is then ship lights would actually be useful, ye?

  • Too early in the development but come release are stations going to orbit around the planets or just sit in one specific place in the entire system grid? Because in a single game session theres no point in having planetary orbits to be part of the gameplay but stations most definitely orbit planets in a matter of minutes or hours. This isn’t counting stations in lagrange points ofc, which would explain their stationary nature.

  • Are there going to be some sort of auto-docking or escort commands similar to Freelancer?

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Looks awesome, thx for sharing @frag971

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Yeah, i absolutely adore the sense of scale you get. i cant wait to play this game, even tho i know it will take so long :smiley:

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[quote=“frag971, post:1, topic:4701”]
Station shadow transitions on the cockpit seem binary, would it be possible to add either “real” transitions or perhaps a fake terminator sliding across the cockpit? I’m sure this is already plannet, was just wondering.[/quote]

I’m not sure to understand what you mean by binary, there are no fake shadows here.

The small lights are parts of textures, at the moment it’s just a generic texture tiling over the entire station but that’s just for placeholder. Windows will be modelled and textured separately.

[quote=“frag971, post:1, topic:4701”]
There seems to be a blue global iluminating light across the station in areas it should be dark/black in specific exposure settings, is something like this going to remain for gameplay purposes or are we actually going to get “realistic” lighting in the future and bumping into stations because of an unfortunate viewing angle is going to be a thing? If it is then ship lights would actually be useful, ye?[/quote]

The blue ambient lighting comes from the planet. Unfortunately it “leaks” inside the station. We have some ideas to fix that but it’s more like tricks; proper solutions would be performance expensive. We’ll see what we can do later but it’s not high priority atm. Note that the hangar/garages in this video weren’t lit yet. There’s lighting in them in the latest patch already.

[quote=“frag971, post:1, topic:4701”]
Too early in the development but come release are stations going to orbit around the planets or just sit in one specific place in the entire system grid? Because in a single game session theres no point in having planetary orbits to be part of the gameplay but stations most definitely orbit planets in a matter of minutes or hours. This isn’t counting stations in lagrange points ofc, which would explain their stationary nature.[/quote]

Stations are static, we didn’t hit the higher funding tiers so there’s no budget to address that.

[quote=“frag971, post:1, topic:4701”]
Are there going to be some sort of auto-docking or escort commands similar to Freelancer?[/quote]

Docking is manual until you fly inside a hangar/garage, at which point landing/refueling will probably become automatic.

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I’m not sure to understand what you mean by binary, there are no fake shadows here.

I mean on the cockpit, i guess the youtube encoding/fps doesnt show it, nevermind, its not important.

The blue ambient lighting comes from the planet. Unfortunately it “leaks” inside the station. We have some ideas to fix that but it’s more like tricks; proper solutions would be performance expensive. We’ll see what we can do later but it’s not high priority atm. Note that the hangar/garages in this video weren’t lit yet. There’s lighting in them in the latest patch already.

That is really nice! I thought it was global ilum, not planetary backlighting. Cool! If the stations are static would it be possible to simply raytrace the blue light and bake the shadows (to address hangar bleeding) during level generation? Im not tech savvy enough so sorry if my questions sound like bull sometimes :stuck_out_tongue:

Stations are static, we didn’t hit the higher funding tiers so there’s no budget to address that.

:frowning: I hope to upgrade my tier pledge soon myself. Maybe in the future ^^

Docking is manual until you fly inside a hangar/garage, at which point landing/refueling will probably become automatic.

That makes sense, will be fun if i can do those long slingshot warp-ins directly into a hangar at max speed just short of crashing into it :smiley:

PS: still cant figure out how to do the proper quotes in replies

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Just highlight the text you want to quote, and hit dat “quote reply” button!

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How about the planets and moons orbiting the star? I know there’s always been a back and forth on it but I don’t think you have stated yes or no yet…it was also a finding issue if I remember right. Is this still the case?

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We had a discussion about orbits not too long ago and came up with a possible solution. It can be found here:

https://forums.inovaestudios.com/t/varying-battlescapes-arenas/4450

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There is no quote reply button

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That is odd. You should have seen it, copy/pasting Flav’s post, pop up as a button when selecting the text. I don’t know what the problem is, sorry.

The actual code for a quote with the avatar/name is:

[quote=“frag971, post:9, topic:4701, full:true”]

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I’m not getting that popup.

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What browser are you using? Do you have a script blocker?

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Check your forum account setting. There’s an option in there to disable the button appearing… Probably not the source of the problem but may be.