Warning: Thread contains a lot of high resolution images!
Orbiter Battle Simulation Project or OBSP for short, needs a home base. Given the needs of OBSP and my particular affinity for Nellis Air Force Base, Las Vegas, Nevada, I decided to create that.
Nellis will serve as the home and training base for OBSP, but it will also serve as a sufficient testing ground for the Air Traffic Control and AI that OBSP is getting. I run into a wall with that, because no base is sufficient for testing.
I need an airbase on Earth with two or more long runways of different widths, a complex set of taxiways, multiple hangars of different sizes, multiple landing pads of different sizes, large enough airfield to fit the needs of the military, yet small enough for the ATC to turn away the largest vessels like the XR5 or Arrow, except for in an emergency.
Only a few existing bases came close to matching the requirements, but none matched them.
I must stress that I'm a programmer, not a 3D and 2D designer. I learned those skills for this project because none of the developers in the OF community I contacted would take on the project. As such, expect that Nellis isn't as good as other top-notch bases are.
Here's the current state - keep in mind that this is very much work in progress:
Surface tiles:
The tower at Nellis Air Force Base is mostly finished. Need some tweaking of the lighting and maybe a touch on the texture, but pretty much done:
Nellis Air Force Base is the home to [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force_Thunderbirds"]Thunderbirds[/ame]. The hangar is deliberately colorful and painted with the Thunderbirds colors. I didn't want Gray and Gray to be the only two colors at Nellis. The textures are not finished. They're quite cartoony right now, but I intend to add more detail on the big, boring walls. Burn marks, scratches,... stuff like that. This hangar is sort of special, because it represents Nellis, so it is the highest poly structure at Nellis and also has highest resolution textures. This hangar is also unique and appears only once at the base.
Nellis also contains some similarly looking hangars, which I've dubbed the "Large generic hangar" and "Small generic hangar". They appear multiple times. Here's the development version of the Large Generic Hangar. Geometry wise it's simple and the resolution is also relatively low, with a single map for the entire thing. You can see a bit of the pixelation, but that's ok. It's not yet done. I have to add a lot of the detail everywhere, but I figured I'd show it anyway:
I'm not going for a realistic adaptation of the base. That's impossible if I want to make the base functional with Orbiter. A standard DG class is twice the width and twice the length of a modern jet fighter. If anyone wants to look at what the base looks like in real life, you can check it out in Google Earth or Google Maps, at coordinates 36.235551,-115.033897.
Constructive feedback is always welcome, but keep in mind this is a work in progress. Don't worry about hurting my feelings. Those who know me, know I am an emotionless robot :lol:
As far as the release goes, I think this will be released along with OBSP and so far I'm considering not releasing it separately even after it's done. I also don't know when this will be done. Work is slow going and this is the second version of the base - I abandoned the first, because of the knowledge I've gained since then.
The quality, as I've said, is not as high as it would be, had a skilled 3D person do the job, but I'll do my best and I am quality obsessed, so I won't release a product if I know I can do better.
Finally, a big thanks to Loru! This base would not exist in its current decent quality state without him. He has taught me so much about 2D and 3D work it's unbelievable.
Also thanks to Woo for helping me fix the public dropbox direct link mess very quickly.
Orbiter Battle Simulation Project or OBSP for short, needs a home base. Given the needs of OBSP and my particular affinity for Nellis Air Force Base, Las Vegas, Nevada, I decided to create that.
Nellis will serve as the home and training base for OBSP, but it will also serve as a sufficient testing ground for the Air Traffic Control and AI that OBSP is getting. I run into a wall with that, because no base is sufficient for testing.
I need an airbase on Earth with two or more long runways of different widths, a complex set of taxiways, multiple hangars of different sizes, multiple landing pads of different sizes, large enough airfield to fit the needs of the military, yet small enough for the ATC to turn away the largest vessels like the XR5 or Arrow, except for in an emergency.
Only a few existing bases came close to matching the requirements, but none matched them.
I must stress that I'm a programmer, not a 3D and 2D designer. I learned those skills for this project because none of the developers in the OF community I contacted would take on the project. As such, expect that Nellis isn't as good as other top-notch bases are.
Here's the current state - keep in mind that this is very much work in progress:
Surface tiles:
The tower at Nellis Air Force Base is mostly finished. Need some tweaking of the lighting and maybe a touch on the texture, but pretty much done:
Nellis Air Force Base is the home to [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force_Thunderbirds"]Thunderbirds[/ame]. The hangar is deliberately colorful and painted with the Thunderbirds colors. I didn't want Gray and Gray to be the only two colors at Nellis. The textures are not finished. They're quite cartoony right now, but I intend to add more detail on the big, boring walls. Burn marks, scratches,... stuff like that. This hangar is sort of special, because it represents Nellis, so it is the highest poly structure at Nellis and also has highest resolution textures. This hangar is also unique and appears only once at the base.
Nellis also contains some similarly looking hangars, which I've dubbed the "Large generic hangar" and "Small generic hangar". They appear multiple times. Here's the development version of the Large Generic Hangar. Geometry wise it's simple and the resolution is also relatively low, with a single map for the entire thing. You can see a bit of the pixelation, but that's ok. It's not yet done. I have to add a lot of the detail everywhere, but I figured I'd show it anyway:
I'm not going for a realistic adaptation of the base. That's impossible if I want to make the base functional with Orbiter. A standard DG class is twice the width and twice the length of a modern jet fighter. If anyone wants to look at what the base looks like in real life, you can check it out in Google Earth or Google Maps, at coordinates 36.235551,-115.033897.
Constructive feedback is always welcome, but keep in mind this is a work in progress. Don't worry about hurting my feelings. Those who know me, know I am an emotionless robot :lol:
As far as the release goes, I think this will be released along with OBSP and so far I'm considering not releasing it separately even after it's done. I also don't know when this will be done. Work is slow going and this is the second version of the base - I abandoned the first, because of the knowledge I've gained since then.
The quality, as I've said, is not as high as it would be, had a skilled 3D person do the job, but I'll do my best and I am quality obsessed, so I won't release a product if I know I can do better.
Finally, a big thanks to Loru! This base would not exist in its current decent quality state without him. He has taught me so much about 2D and 3D work it's unbelievable.
Also thanks to Woo for helping me fix the public dropbox direct link mess very quickly.
Last edited: