are the builder units going to be still while they build or will they move and spray to different areas while they are lathing? I would like to see builder units move around and have model motion when they spray it. Only ones from TA that did this were planes and they just circled in the air. could the commander arm go back and forth like top right corner to bottom left so its a diagonal? and the lather arms of builders do the same?
What if you have 10 engineers building something? The traffic jab would be frustrating, to say the least. Not to mention it's inefficient if they can do the same thing without moving. Planes avoid this by not colliding, and their movement can be explained as necessary for lift.
I wouldn't mind the engineers and your commander moving their arms while they Lathe to show them getting all the nanites everywhere but actual movement... No thanks.
Yea I would be fine with construction arms slightly moving and spraying the nanolaths around but nothing major. It's important that you see actual buildings being built, like from the general scheme into a fully built building. Thats the only important thing when talking about this part of the game.
Just the lathing arm movements not the base model that traffic would be insane. that would be just to show it is taking more effort.
Funnily enough that's harder to do on modern video cards than when I wrote it in the original game where drawing lines was easy. Ben will make something cool.
Good. Because theoretically it's somewhat accurate. I don't know if you guys have ever seen a 3d printer work, but it basically makes stuff layer by layer, filling in the empty spots with a soluble material, then when you're done you put the whole thing in a vat of liquid which dissolves the soluble stuff. That's kind of how I see nanolathing, building a structure layer by layer by adding the nano-stuff or whatever. Definitely hoping for cool animation!
Just be careful not to make it too cool then we will start staring at the animation and forget about everything else :lol:
Also if possible during nanolathion, if you tell the engineer to move, let it nanolathe as long as hes within reach from the building that he is creating. Automatically stopping the nanolathion cause you told him to move a bit is annoying as presented in SupCom. Annoyed me a lot.
Really? Well, you can no longer rely on drawing actual lines along the edges of the model, but with the vast resources you have available, it should be easy enough to create a second texture with the "wireframe" and to create a transition via shader. Only difficulty: Transparency and seeing the "inner" of the model.
If I recall correctly, many software and hardware graphical APIs back then had actual "draw line" commands. All that was needed was to convert the edges of a mesh to 2d coordinates and feed them to the API call. Nowadays you'd have to use shaders for edge detection, shaders for edge drawing, shaders for this and that, etc. It's not difficult, but there's a lot more to do and a lot more edge cases (lol) to think about when implementing. Compare that to a simple function call or two.
Not to mention that the 3D models are significantly more complex nowadays, it's might not even look that good if you did it! Mike
