Will the 3D models be skinnable?

[Vigilante]

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[Lempereur1]

Hi:

First let me say thanks for your interest in our upcoming Debut, Distant Guns.
I think when you finally get to play it, you will find a whole new affection for the Russo-Japanese war.

The models in Distant Guns are a special proprietary format designed to work at high speed inside our 3D game environment. To achieve the frame rate and numbers of ships that we do, Norm developed an entirely unique way of handling and manipulating large numbers of battlefiled objects (wait till you see the 19th century version!).

To achieve this, we had to do more than just make 3D models out of Studio Max or Soft Image and Skin them. THey are encrypted into a highly optimized format to facilitate maximum through put and frame rate. The downside is that they are encrypted to into a highly optimized format to facilitate maximum through put and frame rate.

At this time the public is unable to edit any of the atributes or models inside our engine. Sorry, but Norm's genius has its price.....:]

Sincerely,

Jim Rose
Kappelmeister
StormEagleStudios.Com

[NormKoger]

On a simpler note...

Our primary 3d artist has done a remarkable job of creating a set of detailed models of these ships. A portion of the appearance of the ships is due to texturing, but there is also a great deal of unique, complex, efficiently allocated geometry involved. "Skinning", in the usual sense, wouldn't really work. You would have to replace the entire composite mesh set, along with all the links to things like weapon stations, smoke emitters, light locations, etc. And since the data formats are still in flux, we can't even begin to think yet about end user access. The support headache would be unbearable. Once we release our first WWII title with the Distant Guns engine, the structures should start to settle down enough to consider the question. Right now I wouldn't even know how to approach it.

I suspect the time will eventually come when we open things up a bit for what the rest of the gaming world calls "modding", but that seems a long while off at the moment.

[Tito]

I can live with unskinnable models, but a scenario editor would be nice. Especially for online battles.