Colorful Roppongi

[Sombs]

Colorful Roppongi

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Kusari always had a very special setting in Freelancer and Discovery. In vanilla, we mostly got to experience calm and empty, wide open systems but also hidden treasures of the Kusarian underground, like Kyoto. Most memorable, by far, however, is Heaven's Gate, where Ozu sacrificed himself to take out Tekagi by blowing him up. Sometimes, the simplest solutions are the best.

Today, we know Kusari as the home of weebs. The house of big-tiddy 2D lesbians, where people show off their japanese skills to the few people who just pass by for powertrading. Part of Sirius where nobody tries to contest the claims of the players who decided to represent the NPC factions and the Kusarian Government, simply because nobody cares. In return, players know what they get when they enter Kusari: A handful people who will RP you against the wall, and a handful of Russians who log to kill, Conn and repeat.

Not much that can be done about it. Nevertheless, whenever I grab a transport in Singleplayer and just spend an hour smuggling or regular trading for the fun of it, I can't help but feel annoyed by how incredibly empty New Tokyo and basically all of Kusari is. Shikoku stands out as only good example here, as it has a beautiful color play with the nebulae and the background, making the transit a pure delight. The trade lane flights take just enough time to get a good look at the system, and smuggling is fun because of the view from the nebulae.

New Tokyo on the other hand does not have any nebulae. And the background is just blue. The system's sun is a large white sun, very bright. Weirdly enough, vanilla Freelancer did pretty much everything to not make the player go to New Tokyo, with missions taking place in Kyushu (arrival with Juni near Aso), the raid on the shipyard in Honshu and the story's climax, starting at Kyoto and ending in Tohoku. New Tokyo feels naked, and if you compare the home systems of all other houses, it feels like New Tokyo was forgotten or neglected. Yes, the Kishiro station looks cool now and there is a towed base along a lane that has as much traffic as your bedroom, but I'm specifically looking at Planet New Tokyo and Roppongi now - hence the name of the thread.

Planet New Tokyo has a very ugly texture. Of all the planet textures we have, it has the ugliest. It's pixelated and aged horribly, not at all as pretty as Kyushu or Gran Canaria or comparable planets. And the only station in orbit is Roppongi Station owned by Interspace Commerce. The Infocard describes the station as both place of commerce and location of house embassies. Roppongi, unlike many, many other significantly less important stations, has not seen any upgrades yet. And I wanted to change that in my singleplayer build, just for the fun of it, and possibly to explain to the apes who didn't understand my critique in another thread about it why New Tokyo is such a bland, repulsive system.

Kusarian design is strongly traditional and aesthetic. Tokugawas, who are on par with the a lot less fashionable Rheinland Bismarcks, combine the peak technological advancements of Kusari with playful beauty. There is a lot of stuff on those warships that doesn't serve a purpose other than looking badass. Stations in Kusari do not reflect that at all. While Rheinland literally build a Ring around New Berlin, New Tokyo offers nothing. And that's weird, since Kusari is based on japanese traditions, which are full of celebrations and colors. Hell, look at the planet scene of New Tokyo. Yes, a lot of rain, but a LOT of pretty things going on on the surface.

So, since there is nothing but Roppongi in the weirdly tight space in front of New Tokyo, I took some time to play around with possible decorations. Vanilla did a good job filling empty spots with resource depots, inviting the player to just blast them with very little reward. Discovery does not do that for reasons, however leaving us with... empty spots. Manhattan utilizes the orbit well with Trenton, a shipping platform with a weirdly inviting surface, just large enough to have fighters sit on top of it. My first idea was to give the orbit of New Tokyo something similar, a place where fighters can "sit" and watch other ships move by.

My first idea was to go for some kind of parking lot, where large ships can moor and take shuttles to get to the surface. Not just a mooring fixture, but an actual parking lot, as home planets are likely very much more visited by large transports than any other. I felt like just planting discs there wouldn't do the trick, so I connected them and put ice crystals onto them. Since they are super large, I put some pillar-like habitats below the discs, to cover the lower parts of the ice crystals. I also toyed around with the placeable ice spike props for tiny ice statues or ice trees. They look stupid, but I just wanted to see what could be done with them in convenient ways.

The ice spires were supposed to have a slight resemblance to the in japan frequently seen seals that are wrapped around trees and rocks.

I liked what I ended up with, but it didn't feel fully satisfying yet, so I kept tinkering around and eventually moved the stuff over to Roppongi. As you may or may not know, Roppongi, in japan, is the place to go when you are a tourist and want to shop. And when you want to attract tourists, you also make sure they get something mildly interesting to look at. Figuring these ice spires are somewhat matching that "something mildly interesting", and remembering that in Berlin is a big shopping mall with tall spires hanging up from the ceiling on various levels while you use the escalators to get to other levels, I placed the spires around Roppongi like this...

As you can see, I also added lights to the crystals. The props we have are fully solid, so there is no way of creating light-refraction inside the crystals like you would maybe know it from Warframe or specifically Everspace.

We can't do that effect in Discovery, since Freelancer's lighting engine is rather... well, surfaces look like paper with textures. That will never change. However, with the ice crystals, I tried to recreate the effect with light sources. That was a bit tricky since in Discovery, you can't have an object be influenced by more than three light sources. It's a hard limit. New Tokyo's orbit has two light sources: One is New Tokyo's sun, which emits a strong, long-range white, and Planet New Tokyo's sunlight refraction. Meaning there is not much light to toy around with. Luckily, Roppongi is far enough away from the light source, especially if you reduce the light source's range down to a more reasonable level. With other words, the crystals can have two light sources at their dark sides to influence them. Putting the lights at the bright sides doesn't affect them at all, because light in Freelancer is additive, meaning it adds the light value instead of finding an average of two light sources like it is in real life or modern games the case.

Funnily enough, that means that Roppongi and the spires will be white from one side and colorful from the other - basically like Cyberpunk 2077's contrast between day and night.

Still not entirely happy with it, I thought of connecting the spires with Roppongi itself, arranging them nicely. Here I thought of the theme of Djinns, with halo with drums attached to their back. If you don't know what I mean, think of Enel from One Piece, the ugly guy who is a reference to Eminem. Or if you are familiar with the anime Magi, whenever someone uses their Djinn equipment, they have some decorative thingy arcing behind them. No idea what's the term for that.

As you can see here, it's six platforms, connected, serving as parking lot and they have a neat formation behind Roppongi. One could put a final, giant ice monolith in the middle of them, or a small generated ice spikes asteroid field with snowflake dust from Ontario. Lots of things could be done there. I simply left it open.

There are also some other changes I added to Roppongi. In that one thread, where you can suggest what changes you would do if you could change anything in Discovery, I also briefly explained my idea of adding both local ship vendor ships at landing pads outside the station - so players can see what the station offers without landing there - as well as trading ships of other houses, to show which of them are currently permitted in Kusari (as in, ships representing the houses Kusari is not in war with at the moment).

As you can see, I added these small discs with the repair ships on them. Alternatively, those pads could be used to display ship vendor ships. I just was too lazy to add static models for the Stinger, the Saishi and the third ship sold at Roppongi, and given their size, they barely would have been able to be seen on the gif. For example, do you see the three Core VHFs I put on the main platform of Roppongi in the gif above? Or the three Kusari fighters in the first frames of the lowest pad? Barely visible.

You might have noticed the ice trees, though, which are a little detail I didn't want to leave out, despite it looking slightly weird.

You can tell the lighting engine is weird, because the trees are sakura-colored but the surface of Roppongi's neck isn't affected at all by the light source placed there - thanks to the system's two main light sources, the sun and New Tokyo's reflection. Again, the three Core snubs! They are there!

As for the colors of the crystals in general, I thought of the japanese Sounkyo Ice Waterfall Festival on Hokkaido. An entire town of ice buildings shows up within a very short time, gets illuminated in beautiful neon lights and disappears later again. There are cool videos about it on YouTube, you should check it out. The alternative idea I had was to give every house one specific spire in their representative color, or in the color of their nebula (Crow blue, Walker yellow, Liberty purple, Bretonia red, Gallia... uh, a pack of skittles of all colors)

Anyway, this was my small, mildly interesting documentary about Colorful Roppongi. I hope you didn't open this on your mobile devices with limited download, because if you read this, you can be sure you killed it thanks to the gifs. I should have put a warning in the title, but I didn't. Awesome.

No, I'm not coming back. I even put a sign on Nyx's Minecraft server that says so.

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[Kalhmera]

It looks cool but what does the crystals do for the bases? it it just for the looks? If so then I dont think it should be added. The base design is amazing. Just remove the crystals.

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[Shimamori]

While iRL Roppongi Hils district in Tokyo is the place for colourful clubs and their equally colourful visitors, I doubt that the station presented reflects the RP purpose of Roppongi Station which belongs to the IC and is not even Kusarian. Besides, the design looks cool but not functional and more akin to something alien like a nomad hive. It would be also strange if in a split of a second a boring Roppongi station somehow by scale exceeds the industrial wonder of Sirius - the ring of NB. Mind also that wrapping ropes with paper charms around rocks are a feature of Japanese shinto shrines but not big commercial hubs of a foreign corp.

While certain elements certainly look interesting, the current design presented looks megalomaniac with an excessive number of structural and design elements that do not really fit within the lore or logic. Nevertheless, I appreciate the efforts put into it.

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[Emperor Tekagi]

I had the pleasure to get a peak at this before you posted it here.
The design is incredible and it looks amazing. I would immediately sign this as new Roppongi, with a correct infocard adjustment. Something along the lines of Roppongi being administrated by IC due to its embassy and foreign trade hub role, yet the infrastructure itself is Kusari owned and there's a segment dedicated as a modern interpretation of a shinto shrine. (In a way like Versailles, just IC isn't paying rent for Roppongi)
Heck, hold me back or I start writing one right now.
Alternatively, we could leave the crystals away - drop the shrine part, the base itself is brilliant. I could see myself bullying Groshyr to think of alternatives to the crystals and replace the repair ships (except one) with a wide variety of small transports or freighters.

tl;dr I want.

[Groshyr]

dx8 has limit of three light sources. If you add more, they will randomly appear-disappear on models. In fact, the best you can do is combinate ambient and light sources, placing them the way they will drop light from different sides. For the model yourself you can use glowmaps (glowing materials) and copies of the same model with different materials. That's the best I can imagine right now. As long as Freelancer remains dx8, there is no much can be done about it but finding way to utilise its limitations in our favour - the game is still nice and can be eyecandy, Treewyrm proved that very well with his Nomad effects and models and many more, it just needs a careful approach, otherwise it will be horrific experience with eyes burnt of colour spaghetti.

[Kampanom]

Getting Underspace vibes from this.