I just rented Star Wars: Battlefront 2 for the Xbox…
The space battles are pretty cool; somehow they managed to make it so that you could go from a trooper on the ground in the hanger to a starfighter in the hanger and out flying around the giant capital ships.
I wonder how the heck would someone that?!
Wouldn’t Blender’s clipping limit get in the way?
If some program could do that, I wonder if it’s possible to make a whole ship??
I have the Enterprise-D blueprints, it litterally gives detailed blueprints of EVERY room on ALL 24 decks!!!
So I’m wondering if we have the technology to render all that; let alone multiple ships in a game environment…
To do a complex detailed game environment like the whole enterprise ship, wait till OGRE is intergrated which will be ready for testing by the end of August, it’ll probably greatly increase performance.
Haven’t seen SW:B2 but I’m a gameprogrammer myself and I can tell you that the interior and exterior probably aren’t connected in the way that you think they are in the game. There are a bunch of tricks involved in to fooling the player into seeing it that way (loading different models for different situations). The hangar is the portal that connect these two areas together.
As to if it is possible in Blender (hardware aside), it probably depends only on the maximum number of polys and the time you wish to spend on it.
What he means by portal is a room where the models change. When flying outside up until you land you have a ship exterior model with a landing bay. The instant you land this is disposed of and replaced with a set of interior rooms with the exact same landing bay. To the player it seems a seamless transition but it’s really 2 totally different sets of models.
I didn’t say that you were beaming either. “Portals” does not necessaily imply teleporters. When you move from one area to another (like one room to another) you generally travel through a “portal” in a gameworld sense. This portal is nothing that you can see with the naked eye. It is more of a geometrical object that tells the gamelogic that the next room should be loaded and displayed to you. Games generally fool you into thinking that you travel through vast landscapes and large labyrinths by constanly buffering geometry in and out of memory. What you can see is generally the only things that are loaded at present. That room you just exited, or perhaps even the other side of the room at where your back is facing is gone. Freed from memory It can even get to the extent where enemies running around a corner are freed from memory. If you run after him he will be loaded once again, but otherwise he probably won’t. What you see is often not what you get. Games keep performance up by putting up this kind of illusion. When you are cruising that Tie fighter looking upon the larger ship you think that it has an interior since “you have recently been there”, but in reality that polygon model is nothing but an empty shell. The hangar is probably as much interior as it ever gets. The transition to the interior is seamless, but it does happen. It does not look like beaming to you, since all you do is to walk through a door, but in practice, that is what really happen. You’ve just stepped into a totally different model, probably even made by a different designer.
Edit: Well that is what you get for writing long posts. Someone else beats you to it.
Aside from the hanger, in Battlefront 2 there are two doors on one side of the hanger that leads to a room with 3 more doors that have 3 rooms; they are the life support room, shield generator room, and engine room.
Use scenes, and composite them together - use common light sources and camera motion, and you can layer them alpha over/under in the sequencer - not too much different that how they used to do it photographically for the big buck flicks.
I did that with a planet, a moon, and a ship leaving orbit. The result looks really good IMO.
