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Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: Shivan Hunter on March 28, 2015, 05:02:24 am

Title: Thruster distortions without thruster glows?
Post by: Shivan Hunter on March 28, 2015, 05:02:24 am: Is there any way to have a ship with a thruster distortion effect, but without a thruster glow? Possibly using these overrides (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Ships.tbl#Customized_Thruster_Effects)?

If not, is there any other way to render a distortion effect?
Title: Re: Thruster distortions without thruster glows?
Post by: CKid on March 28, 2015, 09:48:30 am: Yes, Dimensional Eclipse has a ship, the HAF Phoenix which uses the effect that you are looking for. How it was done, I got no clue.
Title: Re: Thruster distortions without thruster glows?
Post by: Droid803 on March 28, 2015, 12:24:54 pm: Code: [Select]
$Thruster Bitmap 1: invisible $Thruster Bitmap 2: invisible $Thruster Bitmap 3: invisible
(and have an invisible texture called invisible)

That's what's on the HAF Phoenix.
Title: Re: Thruster distortions without thruster glows?
Post by: Shivan Hunter on March 28, 2015, 02:10:20 pm: Odd. I'm doing virtually the same thing with a texture called "blank" and the distortion is rendered iff I don't override bitmap 2 with blank. I'll look at how your ship does it, though.
Title: Re: Thruster distortions without thruster glows?
Post by: Shivan Hunter on March 29, 2015, 12:43:26 am: k I've got it working but I'm not entirely sure why, but I think I know. The effect that replaces thruster2 must have a fully transparent alpha channel to hide the effect, but have bright RGB values. Also apparently it can be in either maps or effects and it's read either way lol. Wonder if that works for other textures as well.

fs is odd

[EDIT] OK, how do I get a thruster to point in any direction other than backwards?!
Title: Re: Thruster distortions without thruster glows?
Post by: Droid803 on March 29, 2015, 01:57:48 am: Regarding the edit: You can't, as far as I know.
Title: Re: Thruster distortions without thruster glows?
Post by: Shivan Hunter on March 29, 2015, 02:01:03 am: damn.
Title: Re: Thruster distortions without thruster glows?
Post by: AdmiralRalwood on March 29, 2015, 02:59:07 am: Or maybe you just can't yet.
Title: Re: Thruster distortions without thruster glows?
Post by: Shivan Hunter on March 29, 2015, 03:14:08 am: I added 12 dockpoints in an icosahedral pattern around the sphere (it's a wormhole, or at least it's supposed to look a bit like one) and used a dummy model docked to it for the distortion effect. It looks odd but might look cool once I figure out how to customize the distortion effect itself. The wiki says I can, but $Thruster Bitmap Distortion: filename seems not to actually change the effect.
Title: Re: Thruster distortions without thruster glows?
Post by: X3N0-Life-Form on March 29, 2015, 06:08:52 am: OK that sounds incredibly cool. And quite clever.
Title: Re: Thruster distortions without thruster glows?
Post by: Shivan Hunter on March 29, 2015, 04:21:03 pm: clever maybe, but not a good implementation. This way I have to deal with 13 ships in the mission for every wormhole I use, and docking them all is a bit of a pain if I want several wormholes in the mission. It would be much easier FRED-wise if the thrusters could be part of wormhole.pof itself.

Also, any ideas on customizing the distortion effect? Could I get an example texture that works as a replacement? No matter what I have in the file pointed to by "$Thruster Bitmap Distortion:", the effect seems to be the default FSO one.
Title: Re: Thruster distortions without thruster glows?
Post by: X3N0-Life-Form on March 30, 2015, 01:10:05 am: Oh yeah, I realize it's a total hack - espacially since docked stuff tends to have rather wonky behavior, but then again that's half of what modding is about.