EVN - Delphi

I was running into a lot of dead ends when trying to design stations, and I learned that the cause of my problem is that I'm used to designing things in a single direction. Ships have a logical front, sides, and back, and I'm used to creating them from one end to the other, tacking on pieces as I go. I tied making some stations by creating really rudimentary "ships" and then positioning them into rings and such, but it just wasn't looking the way I wanted, and the complexity of them (many, many grouped parts) meant that rendering them later was going to be a nightmare. Not to mention, my rendering software, Bryce, gets complicated when you want to do textures that don't line up perpendicular to the X, Y, or Z axis.

However, I discovered that my salvation may come in deconstructing that which I have already created. As an experiment, I took the engine and command blocks of the "Forklift" ship, pried them apart, resized a couple, and then reversed the engines so that they would present stumps-out instead of showing the exhausts, duplicated the whole thing and flipped it around, and made this NDC "Assembler".

Assemblers are ships by a very basic definition, in that they are capable of moving from place to place, but their sole purpose in life is to remain in orbit around a planet and serve as a zero-G manufacturing facility. Most of the game's ship outfits will be purchased from Assemblers, and many trade routes will end with a visit to one of these massive facilities, where the demand for metal, equipment, and food for the workers is almost always in high demand; unless, of course, the structure is in place over a planet capable of providing a steady stream of these materials.

Assemblers are generally dull, dreary places, with almost no amenities buried inside their massive, hollow hull. Assemblers span close to five kilometres in length, providing massive interior bays replete with separate product manufacturing lines. A sophisticated, automated tram system carries materials and finished products to the various storage bays that dot the perimeter, where cargo ships collect the manufactured goods and carry them off to various NDC planets. Of course, as suggested by the prior description, corporations openly sell their products direct from the factory, wherein they can easily save the cost of shipping at least a portion of their products.

@delphi, on 27 May 2014 - 10:13 PM, said in EVN - Delphi:

Assemblers are generally dull, dreary places, with almost no amenities buried inside their massive, hollow hull.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE BAR?!?

You know, I always enjoy seeing your progress Delphi. I often don't reply though because the forums always seem to tell me that my password is incorrect every time I try to login and have to get a new one sent to me.... which is silly since I write it down EVERY time... Anyhow, amazing work.

I'm sure you probably already addressed this in the previous 68 pages, but if you ever wanted some people for grunt work in setting up some of the resources to your TC, I'm sure people would be more than happy to help. (myself included)

I very much so like your torpedoes idea.

I agree with vengeance. It's pretty amazing that you've been here working on Delphi for seven years, I have to applaud you. It almost feels uncouth to ask, but, what stage of completion would you say that Delphi is in?

@shlimazel, on 28 May 2014 - 12:31 PM, said in EVN - Delphi:

I agree with vengeance. It's pretty amazing that you've been here working on Delphi for seven years, I have to applaud you. It almost feels uncouth to ask, but, what stage of completion would you say that Delphi is in?

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE BAR?!?

I feel like it needs to be said; "Were all still here"

Even though this place feels barren, I feel like I can speak for the rest of the community and say that we always come back here once in a while to check the progress of your project, Delphi. Even if it seems like we aren't here, we have been doing this for years and will continue to do it.

Its been a long while but I cannot wait until I can play EVN - Delphi, even if it is a long while from now. As soon as its out, be sure that I personally will be spruiking the release of this to all corners of the internet... So will many others.

Keep up the good work.

I can back up that statement as well. I have come back to the ambrosia web boards about 50 times since your last update and every single visit was from me eagerly hoping for any scrap of info regarding your work. EV Delphi = EV4 for much of the community (if you don't give up on us). I know your life is busy as you have the family, work and other adult responsibilities now, but honestly, we are all here and hope for continued work and success on this great plug-in / conversion that we have been tracking for many years. I hope you are well, Delphi. Hope to hear from you sometime

I'm not a familiar "face" here but I just wanted to add my voice to what has been said: I also keep coming back on occasion just to see how delphi is doing I can't wait to play it!

Dear Delphi,
I hope the work is going well, and the rest of your life is also happy and successful! I'm glad to see you have made such progress! Still hoping to see the day you release this monster of a mod! It really has been a labour of love for so many years! Good luck!

For the love of all that is good in the world, PLEASE DO NOT let all this hard work simply vanish before it hits the interwebs! Delphi, we drool over your work so far. Please let us play with what exists or let us know you exist. I realize this isn't life for you, but releasing your project would definitely bring back some life into the community!.... and make a people very happy

Does anyone in the entirety of the internet have a way of contacting Delphi?!?

I know this project must have stopped, but if nothing else, we should get the unfinished product, which might have become EVN's greatest accomplishment if finished!

I've drooled over Delphi's ingame graphics for so long and seen amazing concepts here... we gotta get somethin

Maybe you could try sending him a Private Message. He's likely to be emailed a notification from Ambrosia. If he doesn't respond, maybe you could try logging in as him and get Ambrosia to send him a password change notification. If he still uses whatever email he registered with, THAT should get his attention.

sent pm... "friended" him... hopes

I'm at work, so I don't have the usual hour to give a full update on things, but suffice it to say, I'm not dead, and I haven't abandoned the project. If anything, I'm astoundingly surprised you haven't all jumped ship yet; it's been so very long and I am so very slow.

Progress is being made, albeit slowly. I responded to a PM from 1purevengeance1 to clarify the state of things, and so here's the synopsis roadmap for the future:

- The game world will be smaller than originally anticipated. 600+ systems and content to fill them is just too much for me to reasonably complete. There will still be plenty of space to get lost and have adventures in.
- The game will feature two full-length story arcs, both of which branch off from a common starting point. I originally intended to have as many as ten branched storylines, but again, I bit off more than I can chew.
- The game will feature significantly large shipyards for its two primary factions, and comfortably-sized vessel lists for the smaller factions. I am still dedicated to a certain degree of grandiose ship diversity.
- The game will not feature FMV cinematics. I had some extremely lofty goals when I was in university that are just no longer achievable without looking terrible and actually detracting from the quality of the project. These cutscenes will be replaced with the best written storytelling I can muster, and at least a modest number of pre-rendered still images to help portray certain scenes (the ones that appear to the right of some story dialog windows).

On a really minor side-note, I finally figured out how the ships of the Delphi universe are assembled. I was having the hardest time designing shipyards because I couldn't quite conceptualize how these behemoths were put together. I didn't just want a "scaffold" design like the star docks in Star Trek, but I also knew that the ships would not be built on the surface like in some sci-fi; they're just too big. I finally decided that in the fiction, the ships of my universe are manufactured using an extremely-advanced 3D printing process whereby atomized carbon and other materials are assembled and spot-welded at a molecular level to make the various components and structures of a vessel. Whole ships are built in-place under what is basically a massive extruder, but unlike a plastic extruder, these assemblers can "print" everything from the fullerene of the armored hulls down to the bare copper wire and optical fibre of the ship's internal systems. Once completed, the vessel is practically ready for use, aside from having the primary drive core installed and the human comforts moved in (bunks, clothing, furniture, food, etc).

So yeah, I'm still here. I'm shocked and amazed in great ways that you folks are still dedicated to watching this. I don't know how many people are actually watching this space for updated, but even if it's just a handful of you, I want to give you my story. If I can get this done, I'm hoping to use a majority of the assets I've assembled for this project to make a fully 3D game in the Unity engine (but I will have to teach myself the entire engine from the ground up, so don't hold your breath).

Sounds awesome. Thanks for the update.

SQUEEEEEEEEELLLLSSSSSS!!!!!!!! HE LIVES!!!!!!!

composes self

It's great to hear from you mate! Yes, the forums are even a bit more dead than before, but THIS topic is the reason why I check in several times a week usually. Glad to see you're still chugging. I completely understand the real world/family taking away from your creative pass time and that is in NO way a bad thing. I'm happy it seems things are working out for you!

I know I was never one of the masters of the EVN coding/editing/modding community, but I would like to remind you again though, that several people would still likely jump at the opportunity to help you complete your project. I would be more than happy to help in the project if there is any repetitive boring job you are dreading (and I am capable of completing it). I have EVN installed on my new macbook pro and have mission computer downloaded already. I've played the escape velocity series since I was about 9 or maybe even younger, but a large portion of that time was spent reconfiguring and mixing all my favorite plugins so that my favorite parts from each plugin would work together. I realize my newer macbook pro doesn't run the game tremendously well (kinda slow and very jumpy), but I have my old macbook pro and g4 tower that I can power up and do stuff on as well.

Moral of story: I'm extremely happy to hear back from you and I urge you to consider letting someone help you complete some of the more repetitious and boring components of building your amazing TC!

loses composure once again and starts fist pumping at the great news

I know how much you guys love screenshots of things, because screenshots prove that things are making their way into the actual game engine.

I've been working on designing some new instrument panels for the various ships of the game. In this screenshot, the sidebar is mismatched with the ship (sidebar is for a commercial freighter and the ship is an NDC military frigate), but it shows the functionality of my new sidebar designs. I need to expand the cargo area up top to make it fit more nicely, but the other components are fantastically functional.

Worthy of note is that I've done away with the "energy" system of EV Nova. I figure, my game is set about 800 years in the future (yes, I know that Nova happens more than 1000 years from now); we've probably mostly perfected energy output by now. So instead, I've reversed the function of the fuel meter to indicate your ship's current level of thermal buildup. See, as you operate heavy weaponry and jump between systems, you generate dangerous amounts of heat that need to be radiated into space. So, the fuel bar is depicted as a black rectangle that uncovers a temperature gauge, simulating the effect of the bar filling up instead of depleting. Cool, huh? Here, I fired off a few shots with the Nichron Cannon to build up a good amount of thermal energy.

The shield and armor bars are subtle, but effective, visible as those two white boxes in the central window. Next to each is an icon that represents shields (showing a wall with a beam bouncing off of it), and armor (two vertical lines to indicate structure/hull layers). These deplete from top to bottom also revealing an "empty" graphic behind them.

Stay tuned!

And another screenshot for my collection of desktop images.

Another screenshot with the updated "commercial" status bar. Resized both the cargo area and the text for the whole graphic to give it a slightly more "high-def" appearance. Selected a target to show how the targeting display looks, and again, fired off a few shots to generate some heat.

Unlike EVN, where different governments would have different status bars, I'm building EVN: Delphi to have different status bars according to both government and ship class. So, this interface will be primarily featured on medium to large-sized freighters, and is arranged to best represent freight management: shields and armor are diminished and subtle, with a bigger focus on cargo and navigation. The "TCS Interface" decorative line stands for "Transport/Commercial Starship Interface". Other civilian ships may have other elements at the forefront, such as the thermal regulation on a sport vessel, or the navigation/radar section on an exploratory ship. Obviously, all ships will have the necessary portions of the interface to function appropriately, but the different types should give a clear indication of purpose matched to the vessel type. Military ships will also have differences in interfaces, just to give a visual distinction between fighter/frigate interfaces or large city-sized battleships.

This particular control interface is manufactured by Novatech, the company that founded the paramilitary NDC, incorporated long before the Orion War that decimated humanity. Novatech survived the war, and went on to continue developing commercial and civilian applications of technology invented for the Nova Defence Coalition.

Here's an interesting concept to note, though I know it's probably a few years past being usable in any way (considering how de-populated the boards are, now): if you create a ship with two sets of frames that are identical, define them as "folding wings", and then create two distinct engine glows, you can create ships that actually use a different "engine" glow for their hyperspace jump than their regular engines. This is because normally the game would anticipate that the unfolded wings/engines deploy when jumping into hyperspace, and so it'll show the alternate set of frames during the jump. If the ship itself doesn't animate but the engines have an alternate set, when you jump, the primary engines will cut out, and the alternate frames will play instead. So, you could have a ship with a fiery red engine glow, but which switches to a cool blue pattern elsewhere on the ship when jumping.

I actually looked back at Uncle Twitchy's "Starfleet Adventures" TC, and considered that if the ship animation resources had used this "unfolding wings" technique, they could've had alternate animations between the impulse engines and the glowing warp nacelles, instead of having both power up and glow during all regular spaceflight.

At least one ship in Delphi currently uses this as part of its regular animation, being the "Raven", which folds its vertically-oriented "wings" flat, shuts off its primary engines, and has alternate panels glow when performing a jump, but I realized that the principle could be easily applied to other ships that don't necessarily have a real animation, but using the concept to make alternate hyperspace glows. I'm going to go back and add some "jump" glows to other ships to see if this works well in practice without having other unfolding stages in between. It'll increase the resource usage, but I'm perfectly fine with breaking the plug into more parts if necessary.

EDIT: I had the sprite table for the Raven here, originally, but this video should show the alternate jump glow more effectively, and lets you get a bit of a look at the Raven itself. The video is blown up to show detail, so it's a bit "pixelicious". Also, video compression made the ship a bit more purple than it actually is. Ignore the color.

NDC "Raven" Jump Animation

This post has been edited by Delphi : 23 March 2015 - 02:07 PM