Streamlining barbettes and guns

[AdmiralGunzo]

Get rid of barbettes as a separate placeable. Instead, have each gun turret generate its own barbette. Basically, you place the turret where you want, and using the page up/ page down keys, you would be able to elevate it, while the game would automatically generate an appropriately sized barbette for each gun. 

This would get rid of the visually unbecoming oversized barbettes that you see on so many ships in the game.

This feature would include secondary guns as well. For example, you might want to build superfiring 7 inch guns at the flanks of your superstructure. Secondaries could also have higher barbettes, giving us the option to have three superfiring turrets.

Edited December 21, 2019 by AdmiralGunzo

[Hangar18]

I think doing away with snap points in general is a good direction.

[Kamchatka]

Agree to both points. We need superfiring secondaries. One of the original designs for Dreadnought had a set of three suerfiring turrets at each end. 

[Evil4Zerggin]

+1. Perhaps the Roll and/or Stability scores could be used to penalize excessive topweight when doing so.

[Skeksis]

Modeling-wise, each turret would have to have its extended barbette attach, so you could elevate it, and two tier high as you suggest. Turrets that are not elevated would still have its barbette attached and that barbette would be below the deck, hidden. 

Taking all those 'hidden' barbettes into the battle instance would reduce rendering, not the render itself but at the beginning of the 3D pipeline that removes hidden polys, hidden barbettes, thus too taxing.

Current barbettes system is a WIP, and probably will be the best optimal rendering system at game release.

 

Edited January 31, 2020 by Skeksis

[akd]

54 minutes ago, Skeksis said:

Modeling-wise, each turret would have to have its extended barbette attach, so you could elevate it, and two tier high as you suggest. Turrets that are not elevated would still have its barbette attached and that barbette would be below the deck, hidden. 

Taking all those 'hidden' barbettes into the battle instance would reduce rendering, not the render itself but at the beginning of the 3D pipeline that removes hidden polys, hidden barbettes, thus too taxing.

Current barbettes system is a WIP, and probably will be the best optimal rendering system at game release.

 

Since all turrets should have a small barbette or ring at the base, rather than having the armor resting directly on the deck, and an extension of this barbette or ring would not increase poly count (it is the same shape, just longer), I would think this is the ideal solution.  Route of adding more and more barbettes to pick from to fit different designs and placements seems like a dead end where you will never get something that looks quite right but to satisfy player creativity a huge number of different parts to dig through in menu will be required.

[Evil4Zerggin]

1 hour ago, Skeksis said:

Taking all those 'hidden' barbettes into the battle instance would reduce rendering, not the render itself but at the beginning of the 3D pipeline that removes hidden polys, hidden barbettes, thus too taxing.

Occlusion culling is primarily used for indoor scenes, which definitely do not figure in UA:D. Also it's overkill to do this just to skip a few overlapping cylinders. The depth test will easily take care of it.

Edited January 31, 2020 by Evil4Zerggin

[Skeksis]

2 hours ago, akd said:

Since all turrets should have a small barbette or ring at the base, rather than having the armor resting directly on the deck, and an extension of this barbette or ring would not increase poly count (it is the same shape, just longer), I would think this is the ideal solution.  Route of adding more and more barbettes to pick from to fit different designs and placements seems like a dead end where you will never get something that looks quite right but to satisfy player creativity a huge number of different parts to dig through in menu will be required.

Then game would have to render the polys all the way to the bottom of the barbette cylinder, that's 2 tier length plus ring.

Except in cinema mode, in-which intersecting polys are clipped, if you ever got the camera inside an NA ship you'll see that there's no poly clipping in these games.

1 hour ago, Evil4Zerggin said:

Occlusion culling

The proposal is for a single object of 2 tier barbette and turret plus ring, so this wouldn't work anyway.

1 hour ago, Evil4Zerggin said:

Also it's overkill to do this just to skip a few overlapping cylinders

 Only a few! e.g. say 30 ships x4 mains x8 secondaries each = 960 cylinders, that's alot of hidden barbette rendering, oh plus ring surplus (bottom of barbette surplus).

Edited January 31, 2020 by Skeksis

[Evil4Zerggin]

1 hour ago, Skeksis said:

The proposal is for a single object of 2 tier barbette and turret plus ring, so this wouldn't work anyway.

Then please enlighten us as to what hidden-surface removal algorithm the game is using, that runs "at the beginning of the 3D pipeline that removes hidden polys, hidden barbettes".

1 hour ago, Skeksis said:

 Only a few! e.g. say 30 ships x4 mains x8 secondaries each = 960 cylinders, that's alot of hidden barbette rendering, oh plus ring surplus (bottom of barbette surplus).

You think 960 cylinders is a lot? Here's 1024 cylinders, in a single block from From the Depths, another Unity game.

[Skeksis]

49 minutes ago, Evil4Zerggin said:

please enlighten

frustum culling , backface removal.

[Evil4Zerggin]

Just now, Skeksis said:

frustum culling , backface removal.

These apply to all geometry, not hidden barbettes in particular. They do not explain why hidden barbettes would be particularly expensive as you are arguing.

[Skeksis]

Set at deck level, the combined barbette/turret, with more polys, would be sent down the pipeline but with the current system only the turret is, less polys. @akd understood. 

[Evil4Zerggin]

3 minutes ago, Skeksis said:

Set at deck level, the combined barbette/turret, with more polys, would be sent down the pipeline but with the current system only the turret is, less polys. @akd understood. 

That is the opposite of what @akd said.

5 hours ago, akd said:

an extension of this barbette or ring would not increase poly count (it is the same shape, just longer)

 

[Wowzery]

Another thing could be just give us more placement points for barbettes.  Some of the points leave the forward guns way too far forward.

[visCera]

Additionally, as a fan of destroyers and light cruisers, it is lamentable that these ship class don't have access to barbettes or superfiring options. I'd love to get double 5-inch guns in a superfiring position on the front of my destroyer, but am limited because barbettes don't fit on a destroyer.

[thescrub27]

Sorry this is my first time posting on this but when i was in custom game mode  i noticed i wasn't able to make the 12 inch side guns face  forward or backwards only to the sides on the British dreadnought 1 hull. but with the 13 inch guns i could do this with.  This only a minor nitpick it just bothers me when im trying to create a 12 inch dreadnought and the guns arent able to face forward id like to see this fixed later but really its no biggy i just dont want to see this in the final realse.