1/16th Scale Mapping

I've been tinkering with the idea of building a map for Empires ever since I learned that the devs are intending to rebuild it at 1/16 scale. I've done some initial testing, but nothing really serious because of a lack of 1/16 scale resources. However, I've found some tutorials that will greatly help in building scaled maps.

My question is this: Is the 1/16 scale still planned for Empires 3.0+ or has this scrapped?

I'd like to know before I lean into this project and really start grinding on it.


D-Gen

 

Last I heard, the models have all been scaled, but the physics scaling wasn't working properly.

 

I think that will be the next big question when it is time to implement aircraft because currently the current maps are just too small for fast aircraft.

(Or at least I presume the aircraft will be much faster than ground vehicles at the moment.)

 

What if the air vehicles are heli's?

 

That sounds hilarious.

 

cant we just make aircraft tiny and fly them above people on normal map

 

Erm... no? How would people shoot tiny planes down?

 

How would people shoot down full-sized planes? If they're going fast enough to use a 16x map...

 

I just don't think fast-attack aircraft would fit into Empires, in terms of gameplay and in terms of the technical limitations of Source & binary spatial partitioning.

Empires would be better served by only incorporating dropships (for infantry of course, but possibly some dropships for vehicle dropping too), which can fly at a moderate to slower speed and not have to worry about map limitations as much. Possibly some other vertical lift or helicopter-like aircraft would work too.

If people are expecting to see "planes" and "jets," they're playing the wrong game.

 

Wait, the devs are having trouble with the 1/16 scaling? It should be very simple, infact they should be having no issues what so ever!

 

not scaling models. Scaling the effects of the physics engine.

 

Actually, that's why I asked. Half-Life Rally ran into the same problems with the physics and that cause that entire Mod to shut down. I hope the Empires guys can over come it.

Thanks for the reply,

D-Gen

 

Adapting the physics is on the back burner atm. All the models were scaled down, and are included in the release of empires, or were included. I have them at least.

The other problem is that the engine was crashing when kylegar tried enabling the 2 different type of vehicle physics at one time. he could spawn the airplanes and fly them, just not at the same time as having tanks running around IIRC.

 

Could be that engine can't handle two different physical "worlds" and process them simultaneously with only one physics engine. So the solution would be having two physics engines. One for 1/16 physics and one for 1/1 physics.

But I'm not a coder and I don't know anything about this so don't take me seriously. Plus it would most likely require bought license to access the physics engine part of the very core of the source engine.

 

It's way more likely the bug is in the aircraft code, Mr. Weedy.
They probably accessed/changed a variable or a function is overidden in order for it to work and messed up the thing for vehicle physics.

but I have no real in depth experience with the Source SDK and so this is just a guess

 

Just a question: How does Eternal Silence handle their aircraft?(spaceships).

 

afaik they only use the centre of a 16x scaled map, so its a 8x scaled map with save physics.

 

Yea, all NS maps are at the same scale IIRC. The problem here is that the mod needs to switch between physics sizes between maps. Bit complicated to have them co-exist side by side. It might work better to just scale the entire mod down to 16x, and make everything work there. Then we have the grid space necessary for aircraft, but smaller maps still work.

 

I'm stil unsure as to how much they need to alter for x16 to work.
The source engine already does the calculations in float and thus there should be enough numbers behind the dot to not screw the physics over..

There's probably a lot that needed changes but the physics themselves should have been ok.


that's from my previous experience with game engines anyways..

 

I also heard that they used very hacky skybox code to make the spaceships work. Was it so that there actually happens no scaling inside the actual ships where players can walk as humans but when aircraft goes outside that ship it flies into skybox and gets scaled or something...

I'm not sure about the rest but at least they use very hacked skybox code.