Honorverse Game Trailer 1

[jojo10o]

when is this game finally finish????????

[goodsnpr]

I am a huge Weber fan, so I've been waiting for this game and toying around in EVE until it releases. I thought this was suppose to be more of a strategy game based on the systems more than ships? If so, then wouldn't it make more sense to go with a large scale map and keep the models simple, then upgrade them as the game progresses? Although, what's with the ships stopping and turning? This isn't the stars at war series =p

[captaindiesalot]

I've just read the latest ebook "Storm from the Shadows," if they could ever get this game in the marketplace, it might be enough to get some entertainment company to finally produce a decent Sci-Fi Space movie series of the Honorverse. It could be bigger than Star Wars.

[markaitchbee]

The show is still on. As to when the curtain goes up,that's above my pay grade, as the saying goes.

[eqfan592]

I gotta admit that I like the trailer, though I think I would have enjoyed a single player option to the game. Anyway, the games website hasn't been updated in almost a year now, and most people seem to think the game is vaporware. However, I see here that you were commenting on it in the last 3 weeks. So what's the deal? Is the show still on??

[FearlessSon]

Well, no question about scale. I doubt that anyone but the most anal would fault the change in scale, otherwise it would be impossible to depict visually and dramatically. However, I think that most people were upset more by the realitive "flatness" of it.

Hmmm, maybe a curved wedge would have been better recieved? Something like a cutaway of a cone...

[markaitchbee]

I've been trying to post the link to David Weber's infodump on Wedge geometry, but for some reason YouTube just gazes blankly when I try. If you google for Impeller Wedge geometry and follow the Infodump dot fifthimperium link, that'll show that the wedges are, in fact, very flat. Also, much thinner than mine.

Still and all, it's just our first teaser trailer so nothing's set in stone yet. I've got a policy of *not* soliciting suggestions for boring IP purposes, though.

[Kharmazov]

The Honorverse is a relly great SF saga, but the ship IMHO are simply ugly(not the animation abouve wich is quite fine but the worm like shape of their's).

[markaitchbee]

I've tried to be as honest as I can with how the ships look - the impeller wedge size is obviously bogus, otherwise the animation would have just been three small white dots moving around on screen ;) But contemporary war machines tend to be quite 'ugly' devices. If they looked like the Enterprise, then they wouldn't be as practical as weapons of war. To me, that just adds authenticity to Weber's already self-consistent 'verse.

[Kharmazov]

You have done a reamarkeble job recreating.The ships are just like the ones on the books cover,

but I still think that the they are simply ugly.

Not to mention every ship class in the honorverse looks exactly the same no matter the size,class or faction.And the whole idea of lobbing missile salvos at the enemy reminds me more of Soviet WWII Katyusha more then the age of sails combat.

[markaitchbee]

I'm doing some graphics, yes.

[FearlessSon]

I am kind of curious though as to why the gunports all open at slightly different times. I mean, that would have made sense in an age-of-sail context where the order is given and sailors push the cannons out, but in this setting I would think that the ports would open simultainously since they are mechanical instead of muscle-powered.

[markaitchbee]

It would have made sense for the laser blasts to be invisible, too. But it wouldn't have been anywhere near as interesting to look at.

I could witter on about the ship getting bounced and the weapons bays being in local control or something, but I thought I'd just go with honesty - it looked boring with them all opening at once.

[FearlessSon]

Ah, true.

This was a pre-render, correct? I assume that the impeller wedges were done with polygons with transparent textures and a refractive effect, right?

[markaitchbee]

The wedges are actually subpatch surfaces, but that's essentially correct. The whole thing was put modelled and animated in LightWave 3D v9.2, then composited in After Effects (things like the missiles I rendered as a separate pass so I could just keep piling more shots in as I found a spare hour here and there).  The wedges have a rippling bump-map running down them, a high index of refraction and a blue-to-red vertex colour map.

[FearlessSon]

Ah, good old After Effects. I will have to keep that trick in mind.

Have you considered rendering it with more wedge objects like that layered upon one another with more transparency? It might give a nicer effect, and since it was pre-render you did not have to worry about the speed it would take to render it like you would with a real-time model.

[markaitchbee]

You'd be surprised - I tied up a several-hundred-machine renderfarm for a week rendering this lot out at 720p.

In my initial tests, each "plate" of the wedge had two separate stress-bands, as described in the books. This looked fairly cool, but make for very "noisy" wedges. Again, simply in the interests of aesthetics, I went for a single-plate wedge so they were easier to see through. Thereby trampling all over RMN wedge doctrine, but I wanted the viewer to have a good loock at the top

[FearlessSon]

You are right, that is surprising. This seems like a realitively simple render, being mostly primatives.

However, I thought that the point of wedges was that you could not see what was on the other side, or at least see it as an indistinct blur.

Part of the reason why I bring it up is that the wedge rendering has been a point of contention in the comments of the other YouTube video of this posted on Artificial Software's profile.

[markaitchbee]

The hero model Reliant-class BC weighs in at just under a million polygons. There's a lot of detail that's in there against future need.

The wedges, yes, are *tiny*, and I knew they'd be unpopular. However, if I had them scaled accurately, the imagery would have been three white dots with refracted stars behind at 720p. Not exactly thrilling viewing.

[FearlessSon]

Yeah, YouTube does not allow URL links in comments. Too many spammers were abusing it.

[FearlessSon]

So were you one of the devs on this game then?