I hope I can release my mod in 2012, depends on how much time I have during my winter vacation.
There will be a demo mission where you fly a Strakha.
In WCS the (AI only) Strakhas were done via very complex mission scripting, and I think 4 Strakhas at the same time were the maximum. The effect itself was done like mentioned above, with model switching.
I think there are only few ships that can cloak (you need 4 entries in ships.tbl for each one of them)
- Strakha
- Strakha ace
- Prowler
- Vaktoth ace
My standard mod only includes the Strakha at the moment, but it is possible to change that for future mods.
I did some massive LUA scripting to make modding cloaking easier and to get rid of some errors.
- weapons (switching the model did not transfer weapon energy, missile ammo, some stuff of damage status and so on. Players could perfectly abuse that. Also the Strakha could only use one type of missile. (solved)
- firing while cloaking/decloaking had some... interesting effects. (solved)
- the AI could not be commanded by a player to cloak (solved, the AI wingmen cloak based on their leader's commands, which is pretty cool once you know how to use it.)
- friendlies could always see cloaked ships if you didn't script the cloaking for each one. (solved)
- there was no visual effect so the player could see he was cloaked. I added a gauge and the hud changes color (and back of course).
But one of the most important things for me to do was to make it easier to use. You just need a few small scripts in your mission. The rest is LUA.
There is a small howto what to do so you can cloak yourself and ships, and a demo mission.
