[wipz:Oblivion] The Imperial Navy

[Dwip]

More of an Essex fan myself, to be honest, but.Re: interiors, it kind of depends mostly on if the player can get on board or not. If they can, well, go whole hog. If not, you're just wasting a lot of effort and CPU, and nobody will really notice.[edit] Totally ninja'd.

[prettyfly]

I think I'll make the first version with the ships unable to be boarded, and then depending on how that goes, expand upon it with board-able ships and interiors and the lot. There's no reason why it can't be taken in steps. Oh yes, and that means the will be ballista's, Dwip :grinning:On that note; damn, no far_nifs for the corvettes. Considering the massive volume of textures that would have to be dealt with though, I might skip it for now. There's other far_nifs that need higher priority.

[Sigurð Stormhand]

I agree with Sigurd' date=' prettyfly. Increase the crew enough to actually operate the ships if you can, but don't push the performance factor, if you can help it, to do so. As for the galleys vs. corvettes, it's a tough call. Technically corvettes were smaller and faster ships, but any ship that's oar powered could be considered a galley. In fact, the triremes were one of the best and most feared warships of their time and they were galleys. (Take a look at wiki for more about galleys.)

Galleys are great warships (pre-gunpowder) but like Viking longships they require massive crews. I took a look at Mr Siika's last night and even that quite small one requires a crew of around 50 to operate safely.In case you were wondering, that would be:1 Master1 Mate1 Oar Master4 lookouts/runners1 Surgeon40 oarsmen4 more whoever I've forgotten.To add insult to injury, almost the whole model is open, the only interiors are the Master's cabin and the forward hold.

[prettyfly]

Yeah, I'm definitely not going to be able to have that many NPCs on it. From memory, I thing I put about sixteen NPC's on the one in the photo. It might be unrealistic, but I'm going to keep them; the models look just far to cool. And hey, if you don't go aboard you're not going to know, right?

[Conner]

@Kayle, Dwip, prettyfly, & Arthmoor: I think we're drifting just a wee bit out of period here, no? @Arthmoor, Dwip, & Sigurd: Gratz on passing 700 posts, Arthmoor! Gratz on passing 650 posts, Dwip! and Gratz on hitting 100 posts, Sigurd! @Sigurd: Yeah, galleys were pretty awesome but they required far larger crews (under far tighter space constrictions) than most people even begin to realize, and it wasn't until the slave trade ships of the 1700s & 1800s that they really started having such a thing as a galley with holds and such. Most galleys were basically vastly over-sized rowboats that had, usually at most, a single area enclosed (and subdivided) as captain's quarters and kitchen and, maybe, a small store room. Now, if we're talking a full blown trireme made into a post slave era war ship, you could easily be talking about a crew of 75-100, especially if we're adding magic and "modern" medieval ship mounted weaponry because, in addition to the full compliment required just to get her underway and keep her afloat, you'd also need at least one mage and a weapons-master, and a small crew of "gunners" to operate the ballistas and such, plus you'd probably want a small contingent of archers and swordsmen as well to handle any encounters that got too close for the big weapons. If you actually went there, you'd probably want, in the course of your modernizing, to also add detachable masts so that you could take advantage of prevailing winds once you got out to deep waters which also adds to crew size because it also adds to ship size. All in all, you're talking about a massive war ship that would probably be a terrible beast to model and would require enough NPCs (and their accompanying scripts) and polygons to just about totally kill performance under the oblivion engine. @prettyfly: But, yes, you're right. If you can't actually board the ship or get close enough to see major detail anyway, then even a token crew to just give the benefit of bodies walking the deck here and there should be enough to provide for the illusion, particularly on the corvettes with sails that don't provide a reason to question who's manning the oars.

[prettyfly]

Ok, I've almost got a alpha version ready. No interiors and the crew just wander around on the deck at the moment, though exteriors are more or less done. I will include a way for people to get onto the deck though. I just upload this version here; I'll wait until I've got a full beta version with interiors to put the mod on nexus.

[Conner]

Sounds like stage 1 is almost complete then. If you're going to include a way for folks to get onboard, then these may feel a bit like ghost ships as we already discussed. If you don't allow players to board the ships then just having the crew wander around works well.

[prettyfly]

The feature for letting players get onto the decks is really just so they can have a look around on top. Mr Siika's models are so cool I didn't feel like I could deny anyone that opportunity. It is only an alpha release so it shouldn't matter to much if the place feels a little bit shallow.

[Conner]

I can understand that, but after reading Arthmoor's review of NWN2 and his comments regarding buildings that you can't enter, I have to wonder if you wouldn't please more folk by not giving the option of boarding at all. If they can just get close enough to appreciate the scale of the vessels up close and be able to see, from a slight distance, that it is crewed, they may be happier than being able to get on-board but not access any of the interior and not be able to interact with the crew so they don't realize that the crew has no real scripting and isn't actually capable of actually maintaining the ship. Maybe once you get to the point where your interiors are fleshed out and opened too it'll be worth letting folks on-board and the short-handed crew can be made up for with scripts and dialogs available for every existing crewman? I suppose you could account for the lack of crew by implying through dialog that the rest of the ship's compliment is ashore via longboats and what remains is the skeleton crew essentially at anchorage.

[Arthmoor]

There's a huge difference between blocking access in a believable manner to a few ships vs the way NWN2 blocked access to 90% of the buildings in the city in an arbitrary and unrealistic manner.

[Dwip]

There is, but man's got a point. There's a difference between offering up some smoke and mirrors wrt inaccessible areas with the illusion of life, and brutally ripping off the band-aid ala NWN2.Which is to say I kind of concur with Conner here.

[Arthmoor]

Something got lost in the translation then, I was more or less agreeing with him too. It's not going to hurt things much if you can see the ships and tell they have crews but there's no means to board the ships. It's a couple of locations in a sea of locations (ooo, a pun!) in the game that can't be entered.My underlying point though is still valid. NWN2 handled the whole thing very badly with house after house and building after building having doors you couldn't even activate, let alone try anything with. Unless the devs suddenly decided the door could be used now.

[prettyfly]

Calm, down, its only going to be an alpha release. I'll knock out a beta shortly afterward with interiors and fully scripted crews. I just thought it wouldn't do any harm to have a alpha release with everything done on the outside (just on here as well, tesnexus can wait until the mod is at beta stage).

[Conner]

Ah, you're only doing the alpha here and leaving tesnexus completely in the dark and planning to add all the rest I suggested for the beta? In that case it probably doesn't make a difference at this point anyway. If that hadn't been the case though.. well, you saw the reaction.

[prettyfly]

Yes, I think you guys made your feeling fairly clear. :smile: I'm a big sucker for realism and interiors, I can guarantee you that I would never leave them out on something like this. I think you're requests will be quite satisfied when its done.

[Conner]

Can't wait to see it then.

[prettyfly]

Well, that took a while then...Anyway, V0.5 is up. You can fast travel to the ships, board them using the rowboats that serve as teleporters and generally admire Mr Siika's fine modelling work. All the crew are present, though you may get a bit (or a lot) of slow down due to all the NPC's. No interiors yet; I should have time to get them done in the near future though, and because the NPC's will be switching between the outside and the in, this should help with performance.