Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: TrashMan on December 21, 2004, 05:20:39 pm
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It just pooped into my mind.
THING 1
Imagine this - when writing a briefing/debriefing or a message, instead of "Pilot, you reformance was excellent" you write " your preformance was excellent.
Basicly the current pilot's callsign is read and put in there during missions. not only that, but you can use it in conjuntion with you full name or rank.
"", you are awared the bronze medal for your actions
Would b cool, as finally other pilots would be adressing you properly...
THING 2
Plasing an insignia on capships. tehre allready is a code for that present for fighters, so I guess it would only need slight modifications.
What could that be udes for? Well, apart from having capships having their nations/military emblem on their bridge (this would be really cool. An NTF cruiser would have it's emblem, a GTVA one would have it's own. One could viually set them apart) or somewhere else, it *could* be used for displaying a ships name..
Had a few more but can't remeber right now..crap...
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1) Nice idea, but what if people have stupid callsigns with a load of punctuation marks and such? Names like -==-
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Thing 1 is already possible, I think it's "#callsign". :)
I don't think you can display rank, name, lastname, etc. though. And how would the game know your last name? Unless it was a new thing in the barracks or something.
Thing 2 sounds like a good idea though...
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Thing 2:
This came up very recently but it was shouted down with cries of "Use texture replacement!!".
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Originally posted by WMCoolmon
Thing 2:
This came up very recently but it was shouted down with cries of "Use texture replacement!!".
That's all very well but it's not entirely possible when ships use tiled textures.
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Unless of course, you'd like the logo plastered over the entire ship...just to make sure you know who it belongs to.:D
Oh my God! It's the NTD Flyingpropogandabus!
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Thing 1 is really possible?
Where? In briefing/debriefings? In normal chatter mesages?
And thing 2 is not hte same as the thing I proposed before.
That was a new and much larger logo field. this one is a normal one, only available on every capship without the need for it to be in any wing...
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Thing 1 is at least available in the briefing, can't remember where else (I'd assume in messages too, but I haven't checked).
Thing 2: It might work for tiled textures on second thought, as long as the logos are attached to a polygon and not a texture. I think I get what you're asking, and it doesn't sound like a bad idea. I coud see a logo on a Fenris, and plenty of the older fs1 ships, but I dunno where one would go on say, a Hecate...
EDIT: It's $Callsign , not #callsign. At least in briefing text.
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On a Hecate there could a be logo on each "Ear". Or on either side of the dorsal fin things.
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Never thought of that to be frank.
I thought something on the side of the tower on a Fenris would look cool. The designation on the Orion already does it, deimos maybe up front? Like the Nike corvette?
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Originally posted by TrashMan
It just pooped into my mind.
Make sure you clean up after it then.THING 1
$rank and $callsign have been there for quite some time now. You can use them anywhere, not just in briefings.THING 2
Don't start this again... :rolleyes: The answer is the same as it was last time: Use texture replace, code it yourself, or forget about it.
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Originally posted by WMCoolmon
This came up very recently but it was shouted down with cries of "Use texture replacement!!".
It was Trashman who suggested it last time too. It wasn't the idea that was the problem so much as Trashman's insistance that this feature should be added even though neither Goober or Bob seemed particularly enthusiastic about doing it.
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That, plus the fact that since texture replace does 95% of anything you'd ever want it to do, adding the decal/insignia system would be rather redundant.
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I really didn't know about thing1...cool! Love you code wizzards!:D
Make sure you clean up after it then.
Why so mean? Did I ran over you cat or something?
It was Trashman who suggested it last time too. It wasn't the idea that was the problem so much as Trashman's insistance that this feature should be added even though neither Goober or Bob seemed particularly enthusiastic about doing it.
All I ever said was that I think it would be a superb feature. I never said it must be in, or that it should take precedence over anything else... stop putting words in my mouth...
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also, i'm not really sure but having a ; in your callsign might bork it up.
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I'd like to see the ability to use variables in the useage formulae of debriefing stages.
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using a ';' anywhere in messages and briefings screw things up....
....ive learned it hte hard way.
The thing about the #2 request however, is hte extreme tileness you see with the larger ships. Perhaps allowing it to be attached to a polygon would be more prudent in this case?
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Originally posted by TrashMan
All I ever said was that I think it would be a superb feature. I never said it must be in, or that it should take precedence over anything else... stop putting words in my mouth...
The problem was that you kept saying it. You just didn't take the hint.
Hell you're still not taking it now! :rolleyes:
Originally posted by Singh
The thing about the #2 request however, is hte extreme tileness you see with the larger ships. Perhaps allowing it to be attached to a polygon would be more prudent in this case?
If you look at the High poly fenris you'll notice that the nameplates are made by simply adding a rectangle in the correct places and then adding a texture with the name on a transparent background.
That system works perfectly well on the Fenris and would work equally well on any other ship as far as I can see. So yes. You're correct. Just reconvert the model with two more polygons on it and add the nameplates to that. You don't need to do any serious UV mapping. You don't need to make sure that the texture you use for the nameplate fits with the current UV mapping. To all intents and purposes it's a working Decal system exactly like Trashman is after. So why on Earth he's still bugging Goober about this is beyond me.
Originally posted by Trivial Psychic
I'd like to see the ability to use variables in the useage formulae of debriefing stages.
You can't use variables in debriefings? I don't think I've ever needed to do this so far but it's a pretty odd limitation if you can't. I've asked Goober for the ability to use persistant variables in the briefing stages usage formulae already so hopefully after doing that it will be a simple matter to add them to the debriefings too.
Of course since the variable you want to use will almost certainly have a limited range it would be easy to set up a series of dummy events which you can then check for. Seems like a rather hacky way of doing it though.
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People should be wanting to move from tiled textures (for HTL) anyway, I think, so why bother with decals for capships?
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you know I would actualy like to implement dynamic decals for capships, I think it would be a realy clever useage of the decal code, the problem is I'm doing lots of other things right now, it probly wouldn't be too dificult to do depending on how complex the font code is.
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Plus decals would allow body bound shields for capships.
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Originally posted by TrashMan
Why so mean? Did I ran over you cat or something?
It was a joke based on the misspelling in your original post. Go read it again.
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Originally posted by Bobboau
you know I would actualy like to implement dynamic decals for capships, I think it would be a realy clever useage of the decal code, the problem is I'm doing lots of other things right now, it probly wouldn't be too dificult to do depending on how complex the font code is.
My question with decals is what would happen if the "name" was longer than the geometry had space to display it on? Would it run off past the geometry? Would it just disappear? (I'm fairly confident that it would not follow geometry. Not really knowing how you implemented the decal code in the first place makes me pretty much in the dark here, but that would seem to go against the principle of a single decal in general). If you can get it working, though, I'll be the first to thank you. Did you ever get decals to take on scene lighting?
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Originally posted by Goober5000
It was a joke based on the misspelling in your original post. Go read it again.
I don't like it when ideas poop into my head...
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Originally posted by Goober5000
It was a joke based on the misspelling in your original post. Go read it again.
In that case - good one!
If you look at the High poly fenris you'll notice that the nameplates are made by simply adding a rectangle in the correct places and then adding a texture with the name on a transparent background.
That system works perfectly well on the Fenris and would work equally well on any other ship as far as I can see. So yes. You're correct. Just reconvert the model with two more polygons on it and add the nameplates to that. You don't need to do any serious UV mapping. You don't need to make sure that the texture you use for the nameplate fits with the current UV mapping. To all intents and purposes it's a working Decal system exactly like Trashman is after. So why on Earth he's still bugging Goober about this is beyond me.
Say...that's an excellent idea....
Just one more thing - while that would surely work, when you have 40 capships in the campaign, you need 40 nameplates and 40 nameplates = file space that could have been better used.
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As opposed to having 40 nameplates on Decals? How is that saving any memory at all?
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I sincerily doubt that a mission involvin 40 capships could be good.
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That's a fair point too :D
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Originally posted by Lynx
I sincerily doubt that a mission involvin 40 capships could be good.
There goes FS2's Main Campaign. Since he did say campaign, not mission, after all.
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My question with decals is what would happen if the "name" was longer than the geometry had space to display it on? Would it run off past the geometry? Would it just disappear? (I'm fairly confident that it would not follow geometry. Not really knowing how you implemented the decal code in the first place makes me pretty much in the dark here, but that would seem to go against the principle of a single decal in general). If you can get it working, though, I'll be the first to thank you. Did you ever get decals to take on scene lighting?
Barring technical limitations, it's impossible to have a name exceed a texture because you can always make the texture more detailed. (eg if your letters are 32 px long, the texture could be resized to 512x512 or 1024x1024 to accomadate a longer name.)
Besides that, the text could always be cut off or spanned across multiple lines if the ship had a name with spaces in it.
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Originally posted by ngtm1r
There goes FS2's Main Campaign. Since he did say campaign, not mission, after all.
Quite frankly if you're going to complain about the amount of space it will take up in a zip file to include 40 small textures then you're takng pedantry to such a ridiculous level that it's really pointless in you bothering to make a campaign in the first place.
The textures used in the Nameplate for the High Poly Fenris takes up 3k. If having nameplates on your destroyers isn't work 120k to you then f**k it. Don't use the feature.
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Well even in a conceptual design for this nameplate/insignia feature, how would you (algorithmically) decide where to put the decal? The only way it can be realistically customized ATM without oodles of extra code is to put a nameplate texture on a ship and then to say 'draw text/image on there'. Which is about what we have right now - it doesn't take much doing to draw your own nameplate textures and use texture replacement. The only alternative, as far as I can see, would be to draw a bounding box on the surface of a ship's hull and draw the text or image inside that... and that would be a nightmare to code.
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My understanding of the "text to graphic" approach is that the model would have a designated nameplate geometry section (much like the insignia for fighters) that would automatically have the ship's name placed on there. Then you have bounds on where to place the name, as well as UV data to map it to, so the only complication would be rendering out the name at the start of the mission to a suitably formatted tile. Bob brought up decals, which implies a wholly different approach (in that either the string or each letter, depending on how he went about it, would have its own polygon created for it dynamically) and my original point was that this approach, while suitable for small pockmark-like damage decals, probably would raise a lot of really difficult problems if applied to a multi-character string of arbitrary length. You'll either get super-condensed text, whose width varies from one ship to the next, or you'll potentially find letters trailing off into space, turning very sharp corners, or otherwise behaving strangely/poorly if each letter gets its own polygon. While I believe the second alternative is unlikely to happen anyway just because of the inefficiency involved, it's a question that I felt I needed to ask.
Also, there is the problem of alien ships. Not even Star Trek, the masters of "all the aliens look just like us" routine, have ever made the mistake of using western characters for the aliens' language. I could see wanting to put a nameplate on a Vasudan ship, but if it's going to come up in the Stop font and in English, then there's a problem.
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So we have several issues:
1) Location of the nameplate
2) Size of the text
3) Font to display the text in
All of these would take a crapload of code to implement, would still be more work than the current code, and would be WORSE, because you can always come up with a situation that the code doesn't know how to handle. All you have to do is create a new font and the code would be broken.
The current system handles all these cases with less effort, less frustration, and more flexibility.