- table of contents-
i. Avatar Report
ii. Siber Report
Avatar Report: So, between travel, upcoming holidays, and family, the HW@ team has been pretty busy. Nonetheless I found some time to be semi productive, so let me show off the fruits of my labors.
mothership concept
I showed off this image a while back when it was in its infancy and it took a rather embarassingly long time to get to this state, but it's accomplished all I need it to so I'm going to be moving on from here to turret structure studies, then maybe some closer looks at the strike craft docking assembly. The real objective here was to commit to specific geometry for the engines and the capital ship production bay. Splashing in some color was as much for fun as it was to help restate the shape. Plus it gives me some thumbnails for the inevitable texturing project.
The heavy energy cannons are likely in the mold of the Cruiser-class double guns. Perhaps I will be a bit blockier. Part of this ship class's ingame fluff is that it is very fast. Well, it has twenty engines. Hopefully that is enough.
In other news we've got another three combat tracks lined up for Survival. In earlier versions there was a problem with the majority of music in the shuffle being ambient tracks as opposed to action tracks. We've now brought the two families more in line with each other with a pretty highly varied group of songs.
Dark_Sentinel continues to make progress on the Vaygr Destroyer, animatin' and texturin' like crazy. Per his request we're not posting any WIP screenshots. The engine rotation animation has been deactivated for now as it interfered with bridge blast shields closing and with the rear-facing panels folding in and out during hyperspace. Maybe we'll get it working, but for now it's commented out.
Siber Report: So what have I been up to? A good question! In addition to traveling, visiting family, and doing some tinkering with backstory, I have made some modeling and coding efforts.
With modeling, I have more or less completed the mesh of the workbee ship. This ship is intended to serve as a civilian construction worker, with lots of cool animation in the arms.
I have also undertaken a military conversion of the craft, with the concept that it would have a large armor hood, and park over damaged sections of a warship, protecting breaches from additional weapons fire while it repairs them. I've gone through some iterations on the hood, and am still looking.
military repair corvette view1
military repair corvette view2
military repair corvette view3
More recent versions also include additional engines for the military version, as it has more to move and more reason to zoom.
military repair corvette view4
I'm going to try to explore thicker structures next, as all these seem flimsy to me.
As for the other side of things, I've once again started digging into how to modify the HW2 UI. The ultimate aim is to allow for a new build interface and parallel build, but that's a hell of a mountain to climb without any tools yet. So to practice, I worked on the testing mode, and did this:
All those keys work as advertised, and this lets you set up fights between whatever forces you want in testing. Useful for testing balance and so forth. And will be available to users on next release.
