[Shivan Hunter]

Is there any way to have a ship with a thruster distortion effect, but without a thruster glow? Possibly using these overrides?

If not, is there any other way to render a distortion effect?

[CKid]

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.

[Droid803]

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.

[Shivan Hunter]

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.

[Shivan Hunter]

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?!

[Droid803]

Regarding the edit: You can't, as far as I know.

[Shivan Hunter]

damn.

[AdmiralRalwood]

Or maybe you just can't yet.

[Shivan Hunter]

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.

[X3N0-Life-Form]

OK that sounds incredibly cool. And quite clever.

[Shivan Hunter]

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.

[X3N0-Life-Form]

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.