BSG - Diaspora

tuomas

Part time lurker here, finally registering, naturally to do nothing but to shamelessly pimp some work. Some of you might have seen this stuff on other places before but I figured it'd be a good idea to show this stuff off on a forum full of game artists.

For those who don't know what this is about: Diaspora is a free space shooter based on the popular reimagined Battlestar Galactica tv-show. We're using a highly upgraded FreeSpace 2 engine called FreeSpace Open and are essentially building the entire game from scratch. And no, you won't need FreeSpace 2 to play.

More info on our only slightly out of date website: www.diaspora-game.com

Enough of the boring stuff, bring on the pretty pictures. Oldest stuff on top, newest on bottom.

Classical Viper Mk2, all work done by Wildcard.



Bolitho class support ship. Design by StarSlayer, everything else by DaBrain.



Prometheus, a ship featured in the episode Black Market and seen a few times after it. All work by newman.



Gemini Freighter, all work done by me. Boring ship, but hey, cylons gotta have something to shoot at.



Colonial One, all work done by Mr R.



Shuttle Mk1, everyone's favorite from the original series, makes an appearance too. All work done by newman.



Training drone. You gotta have something to shoot at while learning to fly, right?



Bunch of Colonial ordnance, done by myself and newman.



And here's our pride and joy, Battlestar Theseus. Original concept design by StarSlayer, modeling by meleardil, texturing by newman and conversion work done by FUBAR.



Of course, some screenshots would be nice too.













And to finish things off, a teaser from a cutscene I just recently finished.



I would post more but I think I ran into the images per post limit. More to come when stuff rolls out of the production line.

Alberto Rdrgz

these look great man!! i really like the colonial one!

SkyWay

Hello from 3DDolphin tuomas

SHEPEIRO

nice just watched the trailers...looking good. would say that you may want to increase the strength of your lighting the specular looked a little weak... compared to the screenshots...but it is early in development so....


looking forward to straffing propperly in a space combat sim

Joshua Stubbles

First off, nice stuff and glad to see you guys posting here. I've been following Diaspora for quite some time on ModDB.

I agree with Shep's critique but I do have to say that newman was a bit less than accepting of the same critique when I gave it to him last week (after the images of Theseus were released). Not to sound negative towards newman really, but it seems like he has quite the ego.

Either way, the art in general is pretty solid. I'm a BSG nut, so I look forward to this for sure.

tuomas

@SkyWay: Knew there'd be people here from other forums I've posted this stuff on

@SHEPEIRO: Oh, I agree with you that those old trailers had problems with lighting. Too dark for one. Thing is, the player can change things like ambient intensity, specularity strength, gloss etc. manually and thus everyone has settings they personally prefer. That's the biggest reason for varying lighting in different screenshots and videos; people with different tastes.

Of course, we're still debating what the default settings should be, but you can always go and tweak them to your liking if you want.

@Vassago: Apologies if newman came off a bit harsh on ModDB. It's just that we tend to get a lot of feedback from random people with little or no regard to why things are done in a certain way and it can get rather annoying. I'm not saying we don't welcome good critique, but most of the time there's a reason for why we do things a certain way. Heh, at one point someone was actually asking why our Pegasus has two flight decks on a single pod.

As for your original comment about specularity looking too clean, it's again a matter of the personal taste and settings as I mentioned above. Though I've got to say that one big drawback of the FS_Open engine we're using is the lack of any kind of material system. It means there's no way to control the properties of single surfaces, you can only affect global settings. Sure, there's some room for tweaking with the color, specularity, luminosity and normal maps but those can only take you that far. We're on the mercy of a small pool of talented coders with limited free time when it comes to graphical features

newman1702

edit: double post, accidental.

newman1702

Vassago wrote: »

First off, nice stuff and glad to see you guys posting here. I've been following Diaspora for quite some time on ModDB.

I agree with Shep's critique but I do have to say that newman was a bit less than accepting of the same critique when I gave it to him last week (after the images of Theseus were released). Not to sound negative towards newman really, but it seems like he has quite the ego.

Either way, the art in general is pretty solid. I'm a BSG nut, so I look forward to this for sure.

Well, you seem to have taken my comment to heart since this is the second place you're calling me out for it. I only meant that due to engine specifics the static shots can look off on some angles and that you should wait for the trailers before passing judgement on whether or not the Theseus specular maps are off or not. I just re-read what I said then and I honestly can't find anything inflamatory - going off on two forums about it and calling me out for having ego problems is a bit excessive and uncalled for. Really sorry if you interpreted my comment as an attack, but that's really not what it was.

Nistrum

that looks awesome dude. id love to join you guys but im up to my eyeballs :P

tuomas

*mumbles something about too many greebles and too little uv space.

Bishop

Ohh, that's large. Me likey. Too bad about UVs. Is it too tedious for you to hack it up?

tuomas

Nah, the uv's are all done. It was just a pain to make use of as much available uv space as possible with a ship that's highly assymetrical and is full of greebles and round shapes.

tuomas

Okay, apologies for not posting updates. Something I can't talk about yet took away what little free time myself and many of my fellow artists had, forcing us to put a bit of a hold to Diaspora related activities. More on that later.

Rest of the team has been hard at work on other stuff though and I'm struggling to catch up with everything. So here's a few samples of what's been going on of late with the project.

For starters, here's two trailers our team put together:
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8YjXIPwmW4[/ame]
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k22AGe5tWTA[/ame]

We also had the great luck of recruiting PhRey, a great composer who immediately started pouring out track after track of music for us. You can find samples of his work behind this link: http://www.phreymusic.com/images/music/Diaspora/PlayList/PLayList.html

Oh, and remember that Raptor cockpit you've seen on screenshots and videos? Thanks to Nighteyes and Newman we now have a mk7 cockpit on it's way too and it's shaping up rather nicely:



And a few more screenshots, just for the fun of it. Courtesy of Sushi.

Joshua Stubbles

The progress is looking great guys, the latest trailer is pretty schnazzy

tuomas

New interface template. Those of you who remember how the original FreeSpace 2 version looks like should find this an improvement.

Tea Monster

Models look pretty cool, but the gameplay looks amazing as well. Great work.
The music sounds like it is straight off one of the series DVDs. Impressive!

tuomas

Who here likes cockpits?











All work by newman.

PatJS

Ooh, ooh! Pick me! I like cockpits! Good stuff!

tuomas

Nighteyes playing with experimental post-processing effects. No guarantees they'll make it to the release, but they do make things look pretty.

And yes, I know, some of the shines are way overblown. We'll fix that.







Oh, and I need to correct my previous post a bit and give credit to nighteyes for creating the original mk7 model.

glottis8

reminds me of starlancer... what a great game. Looking good!

tesher07

Your work is unbelievable, especially the cockpit texturing.

Joshua Stubbles

The cockpit looks hot, good job! The mainscreen UI looks great as well but I'm not fond of the random child image. Maybe if the user could replace it with their own image? It just breaks the connection to the game, being a photo of someone I don't know (and being right in my face).

Looking forward to more!

tuomas

Proof that hobbies can learn to some interesting oppoturnities:

As Bigpoint's Battlestar Galactica game is now in open beta testing the team would like to make an official statement about it.

The Diaspora team have never considered Bigpoint's game to a rival to ours. Both games have very different styles and therefore are aimed at fairly different markets. We know exactly how hard it is to make a BSG game and we want to wish them every success with theirs.

That said, we do actually have a vested interest. Several months ago the Diaspora team was approached by the producer of Battlestar Galactica Online with an offer. In order to speed up the development of their game they were interested in hiring freelance 3D artists to make models for them. And where might you go if you were looking for 3D artists familiar with making game models for a Battlestar Galactica based game?

Yep, us.

As a result, after signing some NDAs, DaBrain, Lt Cannonfodder and Newman have all been freelancing the last few months to make a reasonable portion of the Rag Tag Fleet for Bigpoint's game. This hasn't slowed down Diaspora any and in fact has helped as our modellers have basically been paid to familiarise themselves intimately with ships they'll later be putting into the game anyway. Expect to see future posts in the Dev Blog as they start modelling the Diaspora versions of the ships they created for Bigpoint.

-Diaspora team

The game can be played for free at http://battlestar-galactica.bigpoint.com/

Hope this doesn't count as spam or advertising