[Bobboau]

the build
the test data

I'd also like to petition someone to make some good new decal art, everything currently is ripped out of Red Faction and I'd rather get new art if posable. and the glow/burn maps I made or the resuult of five minutes (for all of them total) of tooling around with some color/contrast/brightness controles, so, there realy ugly, let this serve as motivation to you out there makeing new content.

I've added two new features to the damage decals, first glow mapping, decals are lit now, so this will actualy do something, it doesn't suport animation, though I could probly enable it, but all decals would be useing the same frame at the same time (on a single ship at least). also I implemented a animated effect (doesn't use animated textures though) calling it a burn map, it's like another glow map that fades out over the course of however long you want (if you don't specify a time in the tables it defalts to 1 second).
as a result the decal table entry has been altered slightly
(optional)

Code: [Select]


$decal:
+texture:
[COLOR=skyblue]+backface texture:[/COLOR]
+radius:
[COLOR=skyblue]+burn time:[/COLOR]

in this build 'burn time' is actualy 'glow time' I just realised it, but that's irrelevent, it'll be 'burn time' in every other build from now on. it's in milliseconds

oh, and I nearly forgot to mention, becase decals are organised by texture, any given texture must use the same glow map/ burn mapp across all weapons, as a result you only specify the base texture in the tables, it'll look for texturename'-glow' and texturename'-burn' based on that.

[Taristin]

This has env built in, too? I hope?

[Bobboau]

yes, all build I make from now on will have env and decals

[Flipside]

Looks very nice indeed Bobb, especially with the mv_textures installed

The only thing I would say is, rather than have them die out after a specific amount of time, as they seem to now, just have a definable maximum per ship? It looks a little bit strange to be strafing a ship and waching your own hits fade away to leave unblemished hull

[Bobboau]

it shouldn't be leaveing an unblemished hull...
there should be a scorch mark, like the last version of decals you used (only haveing a orange glowing center), though there is only a set limit of how many you can have on a ship (this is imposed more for perfomence and resorce reasons than being a hard limit, though there are hard limits on the number of decals in the entier mission, and the number of polygons they can use colectively)

[jdjtcagle]

Question:  Will the weapons.tbl eventually be put in as a part of the code, so it doesn' t break mods??

[Carl]

Another Question: for the limit, do you mean after it has x number of decals...

1. no more can be created?

or...

2. when you make a new one the oldest existing one disappears?

[Xelion]

Originally posted by jdjtcagle
Question:  Will the weapons.tbl eventually be put in as a part of the code, so it doesn' t break mods??

Is this in Reference to the Media VP?

[jdjtcagle]

no, to the decals... download

[Flipside]

Hmmmm... these seemed to vanish after they had faded? And it was only me cos my wingmates had snuffed it ages ago, so I don't think it was hitcount

I'll keep testing and make sure I'm not losing it

[Bobboau]

@Carl: after you hit the limit, it starts recyleing the first decal in the list, wich is probly the oldest, in fact I can't think of how it could not be the oldest, so yeas #2. though the limit and recycleing works on a per texture basis, so if you have a ship with 20 or so big bomb marks on it there not going to disapear becase fighters are takeing pot shots at it.

@jdjtcagle: no. that would be... stupid. if I made this hard coded, can you imagine the outcry I'd get from people who wanted to use this, and had no controle over it? no I'm following standard procedure for this sort of feature, it's a weapon specific thing so it needs to be made in the tables.

@Flipside: I can assure you, unless you'r pounding something insainely hard (like with fifty fighters) there should be marks left, if you'r seeing anything at all, you should see the decal left there. you sould be able to get I think about 150 decals on a cruser sized ship.

[Flipside]

Hmmmmmmmmmm... Yes, it seems to be ok now, not sure what caused that, if it happens again, I'll see if I can figure it out

One little thing, I was playing around with a blast texture on photoshop, but it seems to slow the game down massively for some unknown reason, they are .dds file as opposed to the .tga ones, but I tried them first as .tga and the slowdown was just as bad

http://www.aqsx85.dsl.pipex.com/Blasts.zip

It could be the 128 x 128 size, but that doesn't really seem an excessive size

They are named after some of yours at the moment, since I was just using them to test with

[Bobboau]

Ishould mention that there are a few bugs to work out of this yet, for instance, some times, the wrong decal is told to burn, it's somewhat rare, but it's anoying the **** out of me.

the new blast mark looks very good.

[Lightspeed]

Bob: I promised to do some decals - and I will definately do this

Might even give it a look today...

[Taristin]

My poor Horus was covered in pot marks after playing 'Speaking in tongues.' Was fun.

[Kazan]

screenshots you bastards!

[Flipside]

LOL!

Heres the higher res versions of those burn marks if anyone wants to test them, they created an incredible level of slowdown on my machine, but then they are pretty large for impact stencils at 256 x 256

http://www.aqsx85.dsl.pipex.com/BlastHi.zip

I'll try to get some screenies of this build today

[Lightspeed]

Theres some odd slowdown with this, similar to what happens with the env maps (sometimes) - though here its more often.



This is the same ship, same number of decals, viewed from external camera mode. There seems to be a magic barrier - if I get closer my framerate gets literally halved - if I'm beyond the barrier it stays steady at 85 FPS. As you can see there's absolutely no LOD switching or anything in between so there should be no slowdown on approach whatsoever.

[kasperl]

Do you have d3dmipmapping enabled?

[Flipside]

Yes, I did, I've disabled it now and will give it a try once Lightwave has finished rendering

Flipside

Nope, still got slowdown.