Broadsword Behind the Scenes

Here's a cool look at how the textures on Howard Day's amazing Broadsword are broken out. He's got 1024x1024 skins on the big panels and 512x512 textures on the smaller panels, special details and engines. Sometimes seeing these "making of" shots are almost as cool as the polished final product!

Well, it's not just a matter of changing colors, but changing designs, patterns, and text, to a certain degree. So right now here's what we're doing:

4 sets of generalized textures:
* 1 Big panels, 1024x1024 - 3 images, Color, Spec, Normal ( the vast majority of the ship is covered by these)
* 1 Small panels, 512x512 - 3 images, Color, Spec, Normal (corners, edges, tiny panels, and other small detail)
* 1 detail and interior panels, 512x512 - 4 images, Color, Spec, Normal, Glow (Leading, and trailing edges of wings and fins, cockpit and landing gear compartments, landing gear itself)
* 1 Engine, 512x512 - 4 images, Color, Spec, Normal, Glow (used on the engines, and anywhere that needs random pipe-y detail. Those insets inboard of the engines to the rear of the Broadsword are an excellent example.)

All of these use the 1st UV channel on the ship. The uvs for these textures are not clamped to 0,0-1,1 uv space, and are designed to tile either in all directions, or vertically, in the v direction.

Now here's the cool part: We take the first 3 of these texture sets, and apply another texture as a multiplicative overlay on the 2nd UV channel. This is mapped to the 0,0-1,1 uv space and covers every inch of the ship. This is what we back our ambient occlusion ( the thing that makes the corners darker than the open flat spaces) and the colors of whatever squadron we want this particular ship to be.

Making the Game: Multiplayer

Here's a very attractive--and interesting--Visio file. This is a menu developed for Wing Commander Prophecy's aborted multiplayer feature. I really like the central sceen for showing what item you're adding to your quick mission.

These updates are thanks to John "Captain Johnny" Guentzel, who provided several CD image archives of material used by the Wing Commander Prophecy development team!

Please note that the "Download" link points to an older-style Visio file; these do not open in Microsoft's current Visio viewer. We have converted the VSD into a graphic which can be viewed by clicking on the document thumbnail.

Multiplayer Download (29 kb) Date: July 23, 1997 Project: Wing Commander Prophecy Donated By: John Guentzel Pages: n/a