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Laserschwert: Man, that cockpit looks REALLY good... LOVE the style! And the details like buttons actually illuminating the dashboard. Maybe we should ask those guys to contribute to the project?
It seems they were a company, so I doubt they will wanted to share anything for free. Their Facebook profile isn't updated since 2012 and their home website is for sale, so I fear they are no more. :(
this bloke is/was part of it and recently active on Unity forums....

[url]http://forum.unity3d.com/members/smb02dunnal.105238/[/url]

This is the most ridiculous forum ever to post a link from :@ they either link back to this topic or don't bloody work!
Post edited July 08, 2015 by MjrParts
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MjrParts: this bloke is/was part of it and recently active on Unity forums....

[url]http://forum.unity3d.com/members/smb02dunnal.105238/[/url]

This is the most ridiculous forum ever to post a link from :@ they either link back to this topic or don't bloody work!
[url=http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/seems]seems [url=https://app.work.com/]work [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_ME]me.

Anyway, I think we can do something similar to that ourselves. I have been talking to someone here that is into Blender. If he gets some time, I told him to build a Y-Wing cockpit following the looks of it in the game. Then the different screens and sensors will be fed with render textures and camera feeds.
I DO like the visuall effect of the external sunlight over the main screen and the round sensors. However, as much as I like how it looks, I am not so sure I would like that while I am actually playing the game. If I cannot find anything in the sensors because the sun is blinding me with the reflection, that would be annoying. I think the Rebels can afford to but antireflective screens for their ships.
What do you think?
I'm sorry there are now new updates for a while.
I have a huge amount of work recently and I have not been able to spend much time with XWVM.
However, last week I managed to mod the iMuse system to allow multiple audio files for each music fragment. The goal of this is to have some instruments "muted" or not at will depending on the circumstances in the battle.

Thanks to the great Laserschwert, now I have all iMuse tracks with the brass and wind muted, and certainly it improves the music a lot. Some themes sound quite different without the wind instruments sounding, giving a different mood.

Actually, I have found that removing wind from some themes that didn't sound like that in the original game, could serve as variations for extra circumstances, making the flight engine's soundtrack much more variate.

If I manage to get a breath from my work, I will assemble a build and upload it so that you all can check what I am talking about.
Depends on how much anti-reflective materials cost a long time ago and in a galaxy far, far away! :P
I'm looking forward to it. :)
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Azrapse: I am still not having a clear view on the Yaw component. Clearly AI can perform pure yaw turns (TIEs do that mainly), however, you cannot do that as a player. When you press Right or Left you roll AND yaw, how much. I don't know anymore than you can complete a full circle and end +-5 degress above or under where you started.
The key to player yaw is actually quite simple.

You do not yaw around your ship's relative Z-axis. Instead, you yaw around an axis 45 degrees back from the Z-axis. To be sure of this, use one of the side views, you will see that the stars move exactly diagonally at a 45 degree angle when you turn. It should be trivial to implement in the physics with this in mind, instead of thinking of what roll to apply.

In XWA, some player ships DO yaw around the Z-axis (all the Corellian transport ships) so ideally this should be configurable on a per-ship basis (perhaps a property for yaw offset angle)

I'm guessing AI ships have no yaw offset in order to make pathing easier to calculate.
Post edited July 22, 2015 by Tarvis
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Tarvis: You do not yaw around your ship's relative Z-axis. Instead, you yaw around an axis 45 degrees back from the Z-axis. To be sure of this, use one of the side views, you will see that the stars move exactly diagonally at a 45 degree angle when you turn. It should be trivial to implement in the physics with this in mind, instead of thinking of what roll to apply.

In XWA, some player ships DO yaw around the Z-axis (all the Corellian transport ships) so ideally this should be configurable on a per-ship basis (perhaps a property for yaw offset angle)

I'm guessing AI ships have no yaw offset in order to make pathing easier to calculate.
AI ships have all sorts of tricks that the player cannot do.
For example, they all can strafe up, down, left and right without changing their bearing at all. Not only they do this extensively to stay in formation, or to perform docking operations. When performing attack runs against capital ships, the AI craft keeps strafing at random directions all the time to avoid the incoming laser fire. You can see this when you are hunting down TIE Bombers, for example, while they are doing a torpedo run on a cruiser or something. Also, it is easy to see on B-Wings during the Capture Frigate Priam mission. They all do this wobbly movement that at the beginning I thought it was caused by floating point loss of precision.

There is many tweaks to the AI like this.

About the yawing, let say that the X, Y, Z axes match the right, up, forward directions from the pilot's perspective. If yawing is performed around an axis that is 45 degrees tilted back from the Y axis, wouldn't that be equivalent to rotating around both the Y axis and the Z axis at the same time? I am not so good at this rotation math things with quaternions, so maybe I need to ask a mathematician friend of mine.
I don't know if this is the most elegant method, but a simple way you can do it is to rotate the ship's pitch up 45 degrees, then do the regular yaw rotation about the ship's vertical axis, then un-rotate it back down 45 degrees, all in the same frame. Some games like Descent do things this way to simplify calculations.

EDIT: Disregard. It's even easier than that. The axis that is rotated around is represented by a unit vector. So you just need to find the unit vector (a vector of length 1) that points diagonally behind and above the player.

Assuming X = side, Y = up/down, and Z = forward/back, that unit vector <x, y, z> would be <0, sqrt(.5), -sqrt(.5)> or <0, 0.707, -0.707)

So if you're using Quarternion.AngleAxis() for rotations, you would supply that as new Vector3(0, sqrt(.5), -sqrt(.5)) in the second argument. I think for that function the length of the vector doesn't matter, so you could also use new Vector3(0, 1, -1)
Post edited July 22, 2015 by Tarvis
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Tarvis: Disregard. It's even easier than that. The axis that is rotated around is represented by a unit vector. So you just need to find the unit vector (a vector of length 1) that points diagonally behind and above the player.

Assuming X = side, Y = up/down, and Z = forward/back, that unit vector <x, y, z> would be <0, sqrt(.5), -sqrt(.5)> or <0, 0.707, -0.707)

So if you're using Quarternion.AngleAxis() for rotations, you would supply that as new Vector3(0, sqrt(.5), -sqrt(.5)) in the second argument. I think for that function the length of the vector doesn't matter, so you could also use new Vector3(0, 1, -1)
I think I follow you.

Having the unit vectors forward, right, and up, relative to the current ship, that rotating vector would be something like
v = (up - forward).normalized
Then the rotation would be
angle = shipRollRatePerSecond*rollInput*deltaTime;
r = Quaternion.AngleAxis(angle, v);

where shipRollRatePerSecond is the rolling (yawing?) rate for the ship translated to degrees/second, and rollInput would be a value between -1 and 1, indicating how much the roll stick is tilted left or right.
All quiet on the Galactic Front!
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MjrParts: All quiet on the Galactic Front!
I can barely believe the amount of work that has piled up on my desk since july. I still have lots to do before I can truly put 100% focus on this. :(
I in the midst of implementing the Close and Loose Escort AI behaviours. But truly. I'd wish I could put much more time on this right now. Maybe in a couple of weeks.
No problem. :)
There's something which has occured to me recently.
What would you think about having optional retro models with cartoonish textures like in the DOS-versions next to the modern models in XWVM?
I'm thinking about something like this:
TIE Fighter Retro (View in 3D)
https://p3d.in/model_data/snapshot/tN1uB[/img]
Post edited January 03, 2016 by FekLeyrTarg
Hi!
First thing, I want to really apologize for basically disappearing.
I have not disappeared, I still trying to squeeze time out of my schedule to spend in this project. Problem is that from last spring my job has involved travelling a lot and dealing with incredibly urgent last minute projects, so when I am not travelling or working, I am really exhausted. I know it's not excuse, but I really really try to get back in full speed here.

In respect to the "cartoony" models... Actually, I have always wanted to get that visual style, even more than fully textured models. Why? These are the reasons:
- Original TIE Fighter models look simple, almost abstract. But when you increase their resolution, they keep that minimalistic, but elegant look to them. Compare that with TIE Fighter for Win98. Those models look quite bad with those low resolution blurry textures. The textured models have aged worse than the untextured ones, in my opinion.
- Even when it seems that you have manually replicated the TIE Fighter model, I think we could somehow extract those models from the game files. That would save us a huge amount of modelling work, or having to use someone else's models, like those from Darksaber from the XWA Upgrade project, or the EAW project.
If we cannot extract them from the game files, we can always resort to model them ourselves, and sticking to that retro look would mean less amount of work also.
- The retro, low poly, untextured version of the models should make the program much smaller and faster. If not much much faster, because today, even Intel integrated chipsets would not even sweat at TIE98 models, it would probably reduce the project download size from several hundred megabytes to just few megabytes.

Still, I think much work has been made recreating the XWA models by other projects, and it would be foolish not to take advantage of that (after asking for permission, that is).
So I think we could have some kind of theme selector that would allow selecting textured models from the XWAU project, or untextured TIE94-style models.
In that case, I think the cockpits should also, maybe, have a textured version and an untextured version.
What do you think?