Using 2D ships

[miklosgo]

posted on February 22nd, 2014, 9:35 am

Last edited by miklosgo on June 21st, 2015, 6:31 am, edited 1 time in total.

Hi. In the last days, I played the "Battleships Forever" space strategy game:
//www.fleetops.net/forums/smalltalk/battleships-forever-12579?p=199422#p199422

It's a nice game, but not as attractive like the Fleet Operations :-)

I have a question:
I'm working on a FO mod, It's possible to add some 2D ships into my mod and use this for space battles, instead of some 3D ships made with MilkShape 3D ?

Bellow you can see a screenshot from a BSG mod made for the "Distant World" 2D space strategy game and I'm curious if I can use such a 2D ships for FO mods.

Attachments

BSGMod11.jpg (39.91 KiB) Viewed 778 times

posted on February 22nd, 2014, 10:40 am

technically i think so you still need a model but instead of a mesh you just need either a sprite node or use a flat mesh with the topside of the ship textured on it then place hps around it (it would be a 2-4 poly model) not sure how it would look getting built or destroyed tho may look odd

posted on February 23rd, 2014, 11:24 am

Would look awful from so many aspects. If you moved the camera the ship would come next to invisible. As it would still have to consist of a basic two poly mesh it would just look dumb in so many situations such as when it is being built as that uses the mesh, when it blows up as well., whenever a weapon is fired, when the ships are fighting and fly close to each other... Actually why would you want to use an engine made for 3D strategy for 2D?

posted on February 23rd, 2014, 11:42 am

Instead, if you use a sprite node as the model, the ship will always appear from the same angle, no matter the camera angle. I experimented with something along these lines a while back, when playing with LOD meshes, so that if you zoom out beyond a certain distance, the ship is replace with a sprite representation (much like in Sins of a Solar Empire). That way you keep your 3D models for the close-up stuff, but get a better/simpler graphical overview when zoomed out.