Note: To understand that post, replace 'hyeracy' with 'hierarchy'. Damn fobs.
Originally posted by KARMA
two other things
1-(but this is more related to converters than to game engine):
to have hyeracy editing after converting:
imagine to have LOD0 and LOD1 converted separately to pof
it think it would be very useful to have the possibility to "unify" them generating a hyeracy between already converted pofs.
The POF format needs not change for that. All you need for that is an editor that takes in several separate models and uses each model for each LOD level. I imagine that's probably done already.
(it would be much more useful to have the ability also to create a turret as a separate pof and to add it to the main pof, but i know there will be much more problems related to this, since you will have to set orientation, position, etc)
It's called a subobject. Unless I'm mistaken, that's already done.
2- to have a "game generated" insigna, something like star wars games or homeworld, where the "colors" of some areas of your ship changes according to the squadron you belong to
In other words, retexturing the entire ship, a la the 'skin' support most modern FPS games do.
That would require some changes to FS2 itself, since it has to be told where to get the new texmap from, and probably scale it down for the low-res textures.
If you want to be really fancy, you could also composite another texture (with alpha compositing!) over the squadron-specific texture. This way, some things look the same (cockpit canopy glass), while some areas can be retextured, but the custom texture is altered (grooves between metal panels). Some areas can be completely retextured. Sort of like painting your ship for real -- some things you can't paint (like the holes in the missile racks, the cockpit canopy glass, etc), some things will make your paint job look a little different (grooves between metal panels), and some things are completely paintable.
Of course, the best way to do this is to have a *NG texture loader, since *NG provides all this wonderful alpha compositing stuff already. All you have to do is take the base (custom, squadron/player/whatever specific) texture for the ship, and composite the built-in texture (always there, has textures for cockpit canopy glass, etc) over it. Voila, you have really freakin' COOL looking ships!