Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: JGZinv on May 18, 2010, 01:19:52 pm
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Well I had someone submit a ship design to me, and part of the theme
is onboard fog generators which help conceal the ship from various things.
Been wracking my brain for a bit, and I can't really think of anything that'd work
outside of something with lua perhaps. Best I could come up with was a engine
without any thrust, but a huge particle trail or glow point.
Any other better informed ideas?
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Welll....I don't think it's really possible to pull something like that off in the engine and make it look good.
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It probably hasn't been tried extensively either.
Ok how about we work at it backwards, is there a way to make a nebula move
in relation to another object? Size manipulation, expanding one way and decreasing another,
might also be sufficient.
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No, nebulae are environments thatencompass the entire mission space. There is no way currently to dip in and out of nebulae. And the problem with the particle code is that it is optimized for debris spew effects and weapon effects; It's not set up to handle a permanent "shroud" effect.
It might be possible to fake this effect in scripting, but I don't think it'll be very efficient.
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Yeah between my experiences with the particle spew via lua and the fact my main coder just
quit our project for school issues, sort of puts a fork in that idea.
Tachyon had a weird nebula system, which I'm not entirely sure how it worked.
It took several identical pcx images of varying colors and when in game, it appeared
as though they were all offset from each other. So you flew through essentially a kaleidoscope
of one color fog. It also encompassed the entire sector you were in.
Example @ 1:12 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoCDAjsqJjs&feature=related
I'm thinking perhaps a similar effect could be reached with rather massive glow points perhaps?
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Take a smoke-screen effect from a game such as CoD4 or Counter-Strike: Source, it's essentially the same sprite, recoloured randomly at different shades of gray, and a slight randomized rotational effect applied to them.
Oh, and the AI would need to be affected by this too--if you can't see through the smoke, they shouldn't be able to either.
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this is one of those situations where you need a badass super efficient particle system, but this is freespace. :D
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That sounds really weird.
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Drunk idea here but what about dropping in a "ship" with a hull that is a smokescreen .eff texture that encompasses the smaller ship. No collide on the smokescreen ship of course. Little trickery with primitive sensors etc and it might just work. What it would look like is another question.
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Take a smoke-screen effect from a game such as CoD4 or Counter-Strike: Source, it's essentially the same sprite, recoloured randomly at different shades of gray, and a slight randomized rotational effect applied to them.
Oh, and the AI would need to be affected by this too--if you can't see through the smoke, they shouldn't be able to either.
Would not work, at all.
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I shall share the ship concept art since maybe it'll help discussion.
The art of Timmon:
(http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/480/demonhydras.jpg)
As I said elseware, the hard part isn't the vent glows, but the fog cloud to be along and
shroud the ship.
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Yea I always figured you had some kind of ship venting effect. A second ship around it with an eff textured hull might work. Then again it might look terrible. Think the bio-armored hull on the TBP shadow ships but with some transparency and maybe more then one layer. Again trickery with sexps would be key.
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It's a gorgeous ship even without the fog. :eek2: Hardly a showstopper if you can't make it work.
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Perhaps, I'm just not one to have a boundary stop an artists work from coming
to life it at all possible. The "feature" might have other unforseen uses as well.
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Perhaps, I'm just not one to have a boundary stop an artists work from coming
to life it at all possible. The "feature" might have other unforseen uses as well.
ironically would this "fog generator" be useful in nebula/cloud visual realism?
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Yea I was just thinking what good it a fog generator in space unless it is several times as big as the ship? You just point your nukes at the middle of the cloud your bound to hit something.
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Well I didn't have anything in mind in particular, although a few things have come up
since I remembered some old stuff.
In the case of this Demon Pirate Destroyer class ship, the fog ties into their creation
and mythos. Demons were explorers or fighters that got stranded, captured, and experimented
on in the mind altering twilight fog by Randall Cassitor.
The fog generator was destroyed in one of the Tachyon missions, so aid efforts were launched
to help the victims. Nothing says everyone wanted help though. That generator was 8th of a freighter sized ship
or so if I remember right... bit larger than a fighter sandwich. It produced a whole sector worth of fog.
So it's reasonable to assume you could mount some to a ship as a cloaking device, or simply a way to
scare people away, or perhaps it strengthens the aggressiveness of the pilots.... ie being high on fog.
Perhaps it scrambles radar and other instrumentation except on Demon ships.. etc etc... need I go on?
Without the right ship cards, some fog in tach ate your ship. Reducing the shields and hull until you left or blew up.
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Would not work, at all.
Never said it would work, just throwing a concept out there that hopefully a handful of people can relate to.
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I always thought it would be cool if you could simulate flying through clouds/fog/whatever by doing a staggered transparency crossfade between the object's sprite/s and the full screen nebula textures. Of course, even if you could get it to look good, making it function in terms of obscuring other objects etc. would be a whole other can of worms, but still. The engine seems a bit spare on scenery that actually affects the gameplay (pretty much just asteroids?), so support for something like this could be pretty groovy--layers of cloud in a gas giant, flying through comet tails, etc.
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Maybe this can help you if you can convert the MODEL.( i certainly can't)
IT's a max 3 model and i haven't opened it yet as it does not open up in 3d EXPLORER
but if you convert it in pof,retexture for some transparency and add it to your ship as a fog generator submodel\subsystem via PCS2 maybe it would work.
On second thought you should create anothe model of the max file and add it as another ship and control it via sexps as it will then be flythrough.
And I AM GIVING JUST AN IDEA.
Download Here (http://www.scifi3d.com/downloads/Star_Trek/Star_Trek_Model/vgercloud%28MAX3%29.zip).
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Take a smoke-screen effect from a game such as CoD4 or Counter-Strike: Source, it's essentially the same sprite, recoloured randomly at different shades of gray, and a slight randomized rotational effect applied to them.
Oh, and the AI would need to be affected by this too--if you can't see through the smoke, they shouldn't be able to either.
Would not work, at all.
Obviously the AI being blinded by it wouldn't work, and unless the particles get properly depth-sorted (which I don't think works yet) it'd look atrocious, but if that could be dealt with, I reckon the same technique could be applied in FSO (although it might of course require scripting, which JGZinv seems to be intimidated by).
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u should create anothe model of the max file and add it as another ship and control it via sexps as it will then be flythrough.
This seems to be a possible idea with current engine limitations.
However, how do you result in a model which is visible but fly through and not cause the AI
to go haywire? Break the geometry?
Getting it to look good would probably be the hard part. As even when you fly into it,
you're going to notice a "shell."
(although it might of course require scripting, which JGZinv seems to be intimidated by).
Don't mistake ability for intimidation. You might be familiar with SparK who worked on a few things and was very inquisitive
around here as he was helping FringeSpace with coding. He knew LUA pretty well. He suddenly turned in his resignation recently
due to conflicts with school. Backslash far as I know does not understand LUA. So the FS project has no one to do something like this.
I myself have no previous coding experience. Just with SparK leaving, I've got a whole can of worms to deal with now in unfinished
code and things we were making progress on.
It's a matter of trying to think this out at a conceptual stage and if at all possible, using the resources at hand.
If it's strictly a code only possibility, then it'll have to be pushed off until such time another coder appears or SCP believes
it's worth trying to create as a feature/upgrade.
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This seems to be a possible idea with current engine limitations.
However, how do you result in a model which is visible but fly through and not cause the AI
to go haywire? Break the geometry?
$nocollide_this_only, or whatever the name of the tag was, is your friend.
And yeah, with this approach, unless there is lots of internal geometry in the cloud, you will have a noticeable "shell" effect.
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The AI being blinded can work if there is a sexp to change the ai profiles mid-game.
Is there a sexp for that.(i am a very basic fredder myself) or is there going to be coz then you can just add a blinded entry in ai.tbl which can include all the normal entries but low accuracy!!
What do you think??
EDIT:Got Another idea,What if we add a sexp of player ship dist from the center of fog generator and (assuming we use a round fog generator) add just a toggle nebula sexp when the fighter enters the fog model??(we would have to add a very light nebula bitmap for this)
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The art of Timmon:
(http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/480/demonhydras.jpg)
Why not try the same thing I did with the Karnak? Make a bunch of really big glowpoints using the nebula poof texture.
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Well I said something to that affect earlier in the thread but it wasn't really discussed.
How'd that turn out for you?
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See for yourself. It's in the FreeSpace Port Media VPs, and if you're too lazy to open FRED, ST:R has a Karnak mission in it.
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Yeah the interior of the Karnak isn't bad. Roughly looks like what Tachyon did to begin with.
Some of the glow edges are clearly visible, but might be able to tweak the look. If it's super sized too
it won't matter as much.
Probably will have to have a set of animations for the ship vents, then a set of glows either on the ship
or separate object that will be the source for the nebula-ish fog.
Question: Why is it not possible to have various shapes for glow points? I mean I know you could for
example make a graphic that had a star and then use transparency... Having only sphere and searchlight
seems sort of like you'd need more.
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Why not try the same thing I did with the Karnak? Make a bunch of really big glowpoints using the nebula poof texture.
So that's what you did. I was wondering how you did that but never got around to checking out the pof file. Quite genius, I do say. :yes:
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Indeed. Same exact sentiments from me. :yes:
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Actually, in as far as using glow points and nebula textures, I too have been considering that for a solution to a problem of my own. Where-as I'm planning on a High-Altitude atmospheric mission in my mod, that will allow the player to fly above or below the cloud line.
I've been thinking about making a number of transparent cloud textures and then using them as glow points around a non-existent ship. (A blank POF with nothing but glow-points). Has anyone ever considered this or attempted it?
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Is it even possible to do that with a POF and not have the game throw a fit?
That'd be my first question.
From my observations on the Karnak, I'm thinking you're going to need sections of glow points.
Like a main cloud, outer cloud, and edge. Using more transparency as you go along... otherwise
that graphic edge is going to be very obvious.
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If it comes down to it, you could just create a simple triangle model (something like that fake Sath from retail), give it an invisible texture and the nocollide flag, and place glowpoints all around it.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that you'd have to do it like that. POFs are sort of expected to hold _some_ geometry.
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If it comes down to it, you could just create a simple triangle model (something like that fake Sath from retail), give it an invisible texture and the nocollide flag, and place glowpoints all around it.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that you'd have to do it like that. POFs are sort of expected to hold _some_ geometry.
Alright, that's good to know.
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Oh... I thought you were asking how to do a rock concert in freespace.
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Actually that'll be my next brain twister...
It's be a space bar on some big asteroid... and the band name will be
either Noid's & Roids, RoidGas, or thrusterWash.
Get your tickets now.
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The band absolutely must be called: "Disaster Area"