[Modeling] What to do with turrets?

u can't hav (moving) turrets in sins

Actually, i dont believe they are separate, in game they are not independent of the ship, they do not move. They are hard points created on the ship mesh.

Though i believe weapon points can be added with research.

But in the "Vanilla" game i dont believe they add the additional points on the fly, as there is no mechanism in place to switch meshes mid game.

The Entrenchment expansion for the game does add this ability, for Starbases, Hangars and some structures, and im not quite sure, but they may add it for one of the capitals that adds weapon turrets, The TEC Marza i believe. But again, they are hard, non-moving additions.

There are those in the SOASE Community that believe such ability may be coming in a new expansion, but nothing official has been announced that i am aware of.

Hope this helps,

-Teal

Does the engine allow any animation on a ship?

Yes but you must use texture/particle hacks.

The turrets are part of the mesh.

before you ask the next question, the answer is 'performance reasons'

they could make it so that they only move if your zoomed in close enough to actually see them move, couldnt they?

Not really the game engine does not appear to be designed that way what you are describing is 'level of detail' you basically get icons or ships in Sins there is nothing in between.

The best solution which fits the architecture of Sins is to allow child mesh objects and expand on the motion/translation of all objects, you can do somethings externally but you can't do everything.

Its not just turrets either, consider things like docking arms on Starbases, ships which change their design in flight for speed or to fire a primary weapon there is a whole host of things.

Performance reasons is just smoke and mirrors because you can just limit its application to limit the system demmands, development time and a desire to do it is I suspect closer to the truth.

Hopefully there will be a feature introduced into Sins which can be used to do some of this stuff indirectly.

No it's performance reasons. SINS is targeted at low end systems and turrets take up a lot of CPU time.

 In any case, the weapons implementation is woefully unsuited for tacking animated turrets. There's no provision for holding fire until turrets have acquired a target, and every single turret having a firing arc of exactly 90 degrees would be silly.

so they'd have to create a new behavior/data/balance format for a properly turreted ship. It would be a lot of work.  Sure it's possible, but all things being equal that lot of work means some other significant feature of the game would have to be sacrificed.

Quote from the features section of the website:

"The Iron Engine is designed to perform well on systems ranging from middle-of-the-road hardware, to the biggest, most powerful machines on the market today.  Effects, number of ships, planets etc. are only limited by how powerful your machine is.  There are no hard-coded limits."

Smoke and mirrors.

Yes it will take some work and doing it in stages would make the most sense so they do not have to create a new behavior/data/balance format, just enhance the visual effects and motion on existing object and support for child objects which can have different behaviour with respect to model space. If IC then like the look of it then yes maybe they should redesign the entire weapon handling system, its already been enhanced for Entrenchment.

Don't forget this applies to mod conversions beyond Sins, so whilst one could sensibly argue that such changes on many if not most Sins ships is unsuitable there are other Sins units which could benefit and certainly other mod conversions or races crying out for this. Why not focus on the benefits instead of the drawbacks?

If they had infinite money and time, they could implement both animated turrets and stationary turrets and let players choose which to use so there is no performance impact.

But they don't. They had to draw the line somewhere. They could choose to implement a turreted system, a turretless system, or do both and eliminate some other significant feature (pirates? super-cannons?). They chose a turretless system because it offered better performance.

It's my understanding that Ironclad came out of the old Barking Dog studios, who developed HW:Cataclysm. It's not like they have some irrational hate for turrets.