i presume that you could see planets from far away the game is really realistic in that form (at least from the vids ive seen and stuff) but for battles like fighter to fighter, won't be too visible, you might see something when a baddy (or goody) goes up in flames. but for big big engagments you could see something, but youd have to be really close, not on the other side of the solar system....
Phoenix out


From this celestial bough all but one did fall into the pitiless fires of reach.
A soldier’s ignominy to have dreamt while his brothers bled. But oh, for the rest of us his shame was our salvation.

There is no zoom feature.

The draw distance varies depending on the object you are talking about. For planets/space stations, the distance at which you first see them is faaaaaaaaar, like around 100K which takes you maybe...15 min to travel in cruise.

Other objects like in asteroid fields are drawn in at a much closer distance, say around...3K, but FL compensates for this by having asteroid sprites in the background. This boosts performance cuz you have less things to render and the effect is well done.

Things like other ships appear at about 3K away as well.

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Edited by - ElectricBrain on 17-02-2003 23:42:07

are there also sprites for ships?
i can remember to have a half Midway on my screen in WC5, that wasn't pretty

Nope. All ships are 3D models.

sprites, i probably have encountered it, but not familiar with the term..
Phoenix out


From this celestial bough all but one did fall into the pitiless fires of reach.
A soldier’s ignominy to have dreamt while his brothers bled. But oh, for the rest of us his shame was our salvation.

The correct (although less commonly known) term is "3D billboards." A sprite is technically a transparent bitmap used to render a character or object in a 2D graphic system, such as Mario the plumber in Donkey Kong. A billboard is a single flat four-sided polygon that is always oriented so that the plane normal faces the camera, however the camera moves through 3D space. The ships in the early Wing Commander games were rendered using this technique. Some flight simulations use this technique to render large numbers of trees on the terrain model.

The advantage to using billboards for far away objects such as asteroids is that there is only a single polygon (actually, as many as four triangles after clipping) and a single texture to manage. This greatly reduces the amount of data that needs to be sent to the graphics card and increases rendering performance. If the video card supports fat point clouds, even more bandwidth can be saved.

--milo
www.starshatter.com

John, I like your sight!
Starshatter look like a good game.
Best of luck to you.

If you need a beta tester, I have been one before, Microproses Falcon4.

Dynamic Missions, I like it!

Thanks, Fox2. I'll let you know. I've been keeping the beta team very small so that it is easier for me to manage. But there should be a new release sometime next month, so even if you aren't on the beta team, you will get a chance to try it out before it goes gold this summer.

--milo
www.starshatter.com

I tried the demo of Starshatter and must say that it's pretty good. One thing i didn't like though: i flew a planetside mission and tried to sneak up to a SAM position. It did go well until the SAM fired a missile THROUGH the mountain that was covering me and killed me in the process.

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"In all likelihood you're going to die out there. We're all going to die out there, but none of us needs to be reminded of that fact. So you die, you never existed."

Edited by - Lev Arris on 18-02-2003 20:59:26

We had that problem with Falcon4 and it was fixed.