Vehicle Handling Overhaul

[Daedra]

Might as well make a new Thread for this, it's widely desired by many.

 

Just gonna quote what I posted before to explain.

 

 

Why don't we just come out and say it?

 

We need a total overhaul of the Vehicle handling coding first, then we can implement new vehicles that won't control like this:

 

[minilogoguy18]

This isn't that sort of game.

 

Have any of you actually dueled online? That is where this game really shines, no SW game comes close to a 1v1 no force (except jump 3 and saber 3) duel.

[Daedra]

This isn't that sort of game.

 

Have any of you actually dueled online? That is where this game really shines, no SW game comes close to a 1v1 no force (except jump 3 and saber 3) duel.

 

We're not talking about the duel elements, we're talking about using the vehicles to battle. This is a request for such a thing.

 

Tauntauns are useless and the Swoops are terrible to control. Don't even get me started on the AT-ST.

 

If the developer wanted Jedi Knight to be duels only, then they would not have created vehicles in the first place.

 

There's actually a pretty high demand for this fix to the vehicles. But don't take it from me, take it from 80% of JKHub and Jedi Knight players.

[minilogoguy18]

The vehicles thing seems to just be for shits and giggles, it wasn't the main focus of the game.

 

The AT-ST does suck in MP, the code from SP needs to be ported over, the misc_atst_driveable in single player works very well.

[ensiform]

It uses separate special weapon entries which aren't part of MP unfortunately and you'd have to break networking compat to add them as new weapons.

[skew]

It would be pretty interesting to see someone pick this idea up. I made a proof of concept of a proper space flight sim back in 2003-ish to present a talk at QuakeCon about alternative mods to counter the onslaught of WW2 mods. Basically I wanted to recreate Tie Fighter in mp. 

 

(Fun facts: While playing with some of the maps, I created a giant bridge to look at various star destroyers in space, which became the first map and inspiration for Jedi Fighter. I ended up presenting both Jedi Fighter and Tie Fighter: Shadowhand at that session, while other friends showed a class-based objectives mod called Balance of the Force. Good times!)

 

Couple of features:

• The physics are all Newtonian physics with a thrust setting, so you need to properly manage vehicle thrust to go in the right direction.
• Entity orientations are internally managed as quaternions (and packed into the playerstate) to avoid gimbal locking. Also wrote some terrible quaternion client-side prediction which needs to be revisited.
• The player dimensions were scaled down significantly, while velocity was slightly scaled down, giving the illusion of high speed in large spaces. It took 8 minutes to fly linearly across one dimension of a map from end to end. All the example models were pretty much to the right relative scale: fighters to star destroyers to death star...
• The .md3 radius field (supposedly used for culling .md3s based on  distance of the origin from the edge of the frustum - but we didn't have the engine source at the time so who really knew!) was increased through a model processing tool I wrote, so you could make massive models that would always be visible (i.e. death star)
• Created a targeting system that allows you to cycle through entities in distance order, and paints a reticle on them in screenspace.
• Created some viewmodels of cockpits (totally untextured yet)

Attached some screenshots. 

 

I'll get a download and the source up in case anyone is interested. It was all in JK2 at the time but should be pretty easily ported to JA if anyone cares. It's not as fully fleshed out as the vehicle system in JA, which I feel is unnecessarily complex for making a simple and fun mod.  It worked with all of the normal JK2 MP maps, which all of a sudden became gigantic and hilarious space dogfighting arenas, especially the death star map.

 

 

 

 

[Futuza]

@@eezstreet weren't you saying something about doing this for JKG at one point?

[skew]

Here are the type of vehicle attributes that were slurped in from a text file. It was stolen from a mod I was making for RTCW, which was a top down vehicles game based on code I started for Combat Quake III Arena (itself a remake of Atari's COMBAT! for Q3)... I loved having so many Q3 engine based games at the time, since you could make your code completely portable between games.

vehicles 5 {
  
  vehicle deathstar {
    type tank
    stats {
      health 100
      armor 200
    }		
    weapons 1 {
      weapon panzerfaust 20
    }
    display {
      turretmodel models/deathstar/deathstar.md3
      basemodel models/deathstar/deathstar.md3
      turretshader models/tanks/photon/bluespin
	baseshader models/tanks/photon/blue
	turretskin none
	baseskin none
    }
    sound {
      movesound1 tanks/panzertank/sounds/movesound1.wav
      movesound2 tanks/panzertank/sounds/movesound2.wav
    }
    physics {
      type treads
      width 30
      height 15
      maxspeed 240
    }  
  }
  
  vehicle tiefighter {
    type tank		
    stats {
      health 100
      armor 100
    }
    weapons 1 {
      weapon mp40 200
    }
    display {
      turretmodel models/map_objects/imp_detention/tie_fighter.md3
      basemodel models/tanks/photon/lower.md3
      turretshader models/tanks/photon/redspin
	baseshader models/tanks/photon/red
	turretskin none
	baseskin none
    }
    sound {
      movesound1 tanks/panzertank/sounds/movesound1.wav
      movesound2 tanks/panzertank/sounds/movesound2.wav
    }
    physics {
      type treads
      width 30
      height 15
      maxspeed 320
    }  
  }
  
  vehicle stardestroyer {
    type tank		
    stats {
      health 100
      armor 200
    }
    weapons 1 {
      weapon venom 2000
    }
    display {
      turretmodel models/ships/test.md3
      basemodel models/tanks/photon/lower.md3
      turretshader models/tanks/photon/greenspin
	baseshader models/tanks/photon/green
	turretskin none
	baseskin none
    }
    sound {
      movesound1 tanks/panzertank/sounds/movesound1.wav
      movesound2 tanks/panzertank/sounds/movesound2.wav
    }
    physics {
      type treads
      width 30
      height 15
      maxspeed 240
    }  
  }

  vehicle jesustank {
    type tank
    stats {
      health 100
      armor 200
    }		
    weapons 3 {
      weapon panzerfaust 20
      weapon venom 2000
      weapon mp40 200
    }
    display {
      turretmodel models/tanks/panzer/head.md3
      basemodel models/tanks/panzer/lower.md3
      turretshader models/tanks/panzer/default.tga
	baseshader models/tanks/panzer/default.tga
    }
    sound {
      movesound1 tanks/panzertank/sounds/movesound1.wav
      movesound2 tanks/panzertank/sounds/movesound2.wav
    }
    physics {
      type treads
      width 30
      height 15
      maxspeed 240
    }  
  }

  vehicle ewing {
    type tank		
    stats {
      health 100
      armor 200
    }
    weapons 1 {
      weapon venom 2000
    }
    display {
      turretmodel models/ships/ewing/ewing.md3
      basemodel models/tanks/photon/lower.md3
      turretshader none
	baseshader none
	turretskin models/ships/ewing/ewing.skin
	baseskin none
    }
    sound {
      movesound1 tanks/panzertank/sounds/movesound1.wav
      movesound2 tanks/panzertank/sounds/movesound2.wav
    }
    physics {
      type treads
      width 30
      height 15
      maxspeed 240
    }  
  }

}

Anyway, I would support a combat flight sim if someone were to make one. I might be able to contribute in a few months too.

[Boothand]

 

It would be pretty interesting to see someone pick this idea up. I made a proof of concept of a proper space flight sim back in 2003-ish to present a talk at QuakeCon about alternative mods to counter the onslaught of WW2 mods. Basically I wanted to recreate Tie Fighter in mp. 

 

(Fun facts: While playing with some of the maps, I created a giant bridge to look at various star destroyers in space, which became the first map and inspiration for Jedi Fighter. I ended up presenting both Jedi Fighter and Tie Fighter: Shadowhand at that session, while other friends showed a class-based objectives mod called Balance of the Force. Good times!)

 

Couple of features:

• The physics are all Newtonian physics with a thrust setting, so you need to properly manage vehicle thrust to go in the right direction.
• Entity orientations are internally managed as quaternions (and packed into the playerstate) to avoid gimbal locking. Also wrote some terrible quaternion client-side prediction which needs to be revisited.
• The player dimensions were scaled down significantly, while velocity was slightly scaled down, giving the illusion of high speed in large spaces. It took 8 minutes to fly linearly across one dimension of a map from end to end. All the example models were pretty much to the right relative scale: fighters to star destroyers to death star...
• The .md3 radius field (supposedly used for culling .md3s based on  distance of the origin from the edge of the frustum - but we didn't have the engine source at the time so who really knew!) was increased through a model processing tool I wrote, so you could make massive models that would always be visible (i.e. death star)
• Created a targeting system that allows you to cycle through entities in distance order, and paints a reticle on them in screenspace.
• Created some viewmodels of cockpits (totally untextured yet)

Attached some screenshots. 

 

I'll get a download and the source up in case anyone is interested. It was all in JK2 at the time but should be pretty easily ported to JA if anyone cares. It's not as fully fleshed out as the vehicle system in JA, which I feel is unnecessarily complex for making a simple and fun mod.  It worked with all of the normal JK2 MP maps, which all of a sudden became gigantic and hilarious space dogfighting arenas, especially the death star map.

 

Wow, cool. Was this something people could download and play together on a server in JK2? If it's playable, there's enough players still to try this out in JK2. I'd be interested, never tried space combat stuff in any JK game.

[minilogoguy18]

It uses separate special weapon entries which aren't part of MP unfortunately and you'd have to break networking compat to add them as new weapons.

What about if the weapon switching was left out and just the overall movement and control was improved?

[ensiform]

Not sure. You'd need a full mod for it to work of course. Anything like that requires both server and client mod changes to be effective/smooth.

[skew]

Wow, cool. Was this something people could download and play together on a server in JK2? If it's playable, there's enough players still to try this out in JK2. I'd be interested, never tried space combat stuff in any JK game.

 

Yeah, it was on my old site (skew.telefragged.com) which is now down, so I need to get it from my archives. I'll post it by next week.

[Noodle]

Yeah, it was on my old site (skew.telefragged.com) which is now down, so I need to get it from my archives. I'll post it by next week.

 

I'm amazed by your screenshots, never heard of your mod before but it looks great!