New Screenshots!

The Team has posted a whole whack of new screen shots on the Official Page. While I still want to get a bunch of cool pictures of the Starfury it is pretty cool to see some of the new cap ship sized models they've been working on.

One thing to take note of, the darker lighting in the newest pictures is a lot more dramatic and makes the identical model look a lot more like it does in the show.

---Arbad

Found this post by Jeff (who has recently returned to the forum) that talks about how level of detail used to help the game run smoother:

• Figured I would address this as there seemed to be some confusion in a thread on the second page.

  The way we do LOD is as follows....

  1.) We have 3-4 different sets of models for each ship. The Ultra High having some poly count, the high having half that, the medium having half of the high (1/4 of the ultra) and the low having 1/2 of the medium (1/8 of the ultra). Oh yeah, we also have a setting to make the ship dissappear from view (way way way out in the distance)

  2.) Each piece of each ship is evaluated when we go to draw a frame to determine which level of detail model to use.

  3.) The we render

  What usually ends up happening is that with the LOD we can knock off 1/4 or more of the polygons. Factor in back face culling and all the other clipping tricks and you have a system that can handle a lot of polygons without bogging down.

  In 3D graphics, most of the optimization is in figuring out what NOT to draw as the less you send to the 3D card, the less calculcations it has to do.

  Hope this helps.

  --Jeff

I happened to read this post by JMS on rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated that talked, in part, about the actors to appear in cutscenes in the game. Here it is:

• There are not more B5 TV movies on the boards, though next week we're shooting the live-action elements of the Sierra computer game (with Lochley, Sheridan, Delenn, Garibaldi and others).

There you have it folks, most of the main characters are in. Pretty cool if you ask me.