[Shade]

That said, I do think squadron logos look a bit too clean and the light doesn't seem to fall on them properly.

If lighting doesn't play nice with squadron insignia, that's either an art or an engine bug, and really no reason for disliking them as a feature.

And a feature they are, and a retail feature at that, which means they should definitely be included on all upgrades of retail fighters that had them. Personally, I'd not consider one of those upgraded fighters to be completed if it does not support squadron insignia. At best, it would a very polished WIP.

[Spicious]

Check out how PCS1 looked and you'd see that UI would need a complete rework.
Basically, changing it into something understandable and describing how all those fields work and what they really do.

How exactly do you suggest it be improved?

In order to create insignia, you need to create some uv'd triangles and in order to create triangles you need to create vertices. That's pretty much all the PCS1 insignia ui was.

[Dragon]

Yes, but I wasn't sure which field does what, their layout was confusing and there was no tutorial or documentation (at least I couldn't find any).
I'm not suggesting improving the way it worked, but rather, how it was presented to user.

[Spicious]

That's fine but if you want it to be different you need to provide specifics of how you would like it to behave.
The "default" would be something along the lines of for each insignia you have the LOD, an offset and up to 10 triangles. Each triangle would have three vertices; each vertex would have a 3d vector of its position relative to the offset and u and v coordinates.

There's an explanation of sorts in Bobboau's learn to use PCS.

[Tomo]

Surely they should just map straight onto the existing UV map of the model?

Thus only requiring the modder to say "Put it here"?

- Decals, not extra geometry. (This also avoid Z-fighting which is a ****ing pain in the proverbial to deal with)
- Do we already have decals? I forget.

For good results it would probably need 4 points on the UV defining each corner of the insignia so it can be suitably sized, rotated and deformed.

- Making the insignia properly 'dirty' is a more difficult proposition.
Less-than-full alpha on the insignia image is a surprisingly good start - I use that a lot at work in a slightly different context.

[Galemp]

There's currently nothing in the code that would allow you to put decals onto the UV map. Right now it's all done as a single polygon just above the surface of the hull. Nameplates are done the same way, but with FRED's texture-replace function instead of a hardcoded pilot-dependent string (for players.)

[Aardwolf]

Proposal: Decals and Nameplates
props to Tomo for the idea

For some subset of the object's polygons, store an additional set of UV coords. These are the coordinates to be used by the decal texture.

These polygons are then drawn with the following render state info:

• Texture: the nameplate or decal texture
• Texture wrap: Wrap mode for both texture coordinates should be clamp (or possibly clamp to edge); there should be a 1-pixel transparent border^*
• Depth: Depth testing enabled, depth function should be "equal", depth mask false (but it doesn't really matter)
• Blending: Blending enabled, alpha-opacity based blending

Because the polygons' vertices are identical to those of the model, there's no need to worry about z-fighting; the depth for the nameplate/decal is exactly the same as the depth for the 'hull' polygons.



^*I've never used it, but OpenGL has some texture parameter options relating to a "border", which from my reading of the documentation, would let you control what color stuff is in the repeating portion of the texture (when it's set to not tile)

[mjn.mixael]

^ That should probably go on the SCP board. It's a good request and something I would like to see implemented.

[Aardwolf]

^ That should probably go on the SCP board.

Done. I'm not sure whether to delete this original post, or what, so I'll let a Mod decide. Sorry for cross-posting!