Author Topic: Release - Moving Arms Sathanas  (Read 7278 times)

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Re: Release - Moving Arms Sathanas
@Axem (or anybody else): Do you plan to develop this thing further? I've got a near-perfect version now, all I need would be a way (may I say script?) to make the the power down-power up effect work (currently only turning the glowmaps on/off works).

 

Offline Axem

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Re: Release - Moving Arms Sathanas
I've got an idea to make that work. :)

 

Offline mjn.mixael

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Re: Release - Moving Arms Sathanas
Needs lighting running down the arms during warm up.
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Re: Release - Moving Arms Sathanas
Needs lighting running down the arms during warm up.

Yeah, but how? With glowpoints you could only cover the point at the arms but not the bow in between them. I don't see how this could be done in FSO; atleast not in a way it wouldn't be perspective locked.

 

Offline Goober5000

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Re: Release - Moving Arms Sathanas
FSO has the ability to create sparks on damaged ships.  Is that functionality accessible via scripting?

I know the fireball system can be scripted; I used that to place the hull breach flames in Deneb III.

 
Re: Release - Moving Arms Sathanas
Damage lightning can be influenced via tables IIRC, but I've never tried it. Unless you depart slightly from the original cutscene (like constant damage lighting in combination with glowpoints) I don't see how it could be done.

As for the different times for closing and opening the arms, I think the easiest way would be to add invisible box subsystems as proxy in case no coder can be found.

 

Offline Goober5000

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Re: Release - Moving Arms Sathanas
Ship electrical arcs are rendered in model_render_add_lightning.  It looks like this is called each frame.  Electrical arcs are normally generated when the ship is damaged, but it looks like it would be possible to jump over that and just add arcs to be rendered separately.

It would be necessary for someone to create a scripting API that could add arbitrary arcs to be rendered using world coordinates.  Then someone could write a scripting function to calculate points along the arms and generate arcs between those points.

I've pinged m!m on Discord.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Release - Moving Arms Sathanas
Release — Loving Axem Modders

  

Offline m!m

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Re: Release - Moving Arms Sathanas
Ship electrical arcs are rendered in model_render_add_lightning.  It looks like this is called each frame.  Electrical arcs are normally generated when the ship is damaged, but it looks like it would be possible to jump over that and just add arcs to be rendered separately.

It would be necessary for someone to create a scripting API that could add arbitrary arcs to be rendered using world coordinates.  Then someone could write a scripting function to calculate points along the arms and generate arcs between those points.

I've pinged m!m on Discord.

It should be relatively easy to do this since the Arc rendering system is already pretty straight forward.

You'll need to add a central arc manager which keeps a list of the "persistent" arcs since the existing arcs are only generated for a short time on the hull of a ship. A Lua script could then add arcs to that system with a simple function call. You'll probably also want some kind of handle to a single arc to be returned so that a Lua script could update the position of that arc.

In obj_render_queue_all the arc manager could be called with the model_draw_list instance which could then add all the active persistent arcs to the draw list. That should be all that is required for this.

 

Offline Axem

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Re: Release - Moving Arms Sathanas

Geeetttiiiing there.

Just can't loop animated particles. :(

 
Re: Release - Moving Arms Sathanas
Just can't loop animated particles. :(

Yeah I had that problem too, so I switched to the beam version of Scroll, which has some advantages and some deficits compared to the scripted version (which is actually particular user-unfriendly if you have no clue about scripting like me).

So here are my results so far. I made 2 versions of the effect - a normal one for the Saths that depart, and a failed one for those who used their subspace weapon longer for some reason and fell/stayed behind. I also added some high-powered glow maps. I'm still working on the subspace beams as I'm not happy with their look yet, but I managed to change their warmup time in a way that they are not that much overlapping anymore, and the range is now matching the "ring" of the subspace rift.

[attachment stolen by Russian hackers]