[Black_Dragon]

few days ago i was thinking if a ships,  could be cloaked?    You cannot see it but it can move aroud and fire some weapons.    Maybee changing the textures to green g-255 ,  like in planets hat the color green vanishes but you can see thru.

Maybee i can ask the B5 Conversion guys,   the shadow ships make same effects of a cloaking action but they jump in to hyperspace.      

[RandomTiger]

Depends if ship textures are effected by alpha. Definately worth a try, I could see that working.

[StarGunner]

Well you can hide ships from viue, and sensors, but The whay the Shadow ships get all the cool ripples is not pasible without a sorce code mod.

[RandomTiger]

Thats what we are here for.
I'd be interested in that job if I werent up to my eyes in DX8.

A simple way to do it could be to have a wrapping texture that moves over the ship. A more expensive way would be to actually animate the texture. Either way Im sure it could be done.

EDIT: Oh, you mean when they leave, I thought you meant their surface, oh yer, thats a more difficult one. Perhaps a pixel shader might do the job.

[diamondgeezer]

Aldo, sort this lot out will you?

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by diamondgeezer
Aldo, sort this lot out will you?

eh?  Why me?

BTw, true green (0,0,255) is rendered as transparent (except for voodoo cards for some reason).l  Actually making fully cloaking (and uncloaking) ships is a bit of a pain in the tits, though - especially as (I think) you can't blow up physical geometry with the damage subsystem SEXP.
With the ship switching SEXP the robotech team did (if memory serves me) you could do it pretty easy by switching to and from a normal to invisible model.

[Nico]

well, we can do that with what the robotech coding guys did, but the code isn't available for public yet.
to explain how it works quickly, when you push a key, you switch from a ship to another ( that includes pof and ship tbl change ). for a cloked ship, say a cloakable pegasus for exemple, you switch from the normal pof we all know to a pof with the invisible map applied to it ( invisible.pcx, you won't find it since it doesn't actually exist, but it triggers something hardcoded). you can also decide to change the tbl data so, say, the cloak device is so energy consumming it'll drain  a lot of power, and, when cloaked, you'll have no shields.
it's just an exemple. we used that to make transformable veritechs.

[karajorma]

Venom beat me to it by just 4 minutes but that was exactly what I was about to suggest.

It wouldn`t work very well for player ships that alpha can order though (the player would probably notice that alpha wing has vanished and that there is now an alpha there too.

It would work very well for caps ships or enemies though

[CP5670]

You could easily make cloaked ship by just making all the textures 0-255-0 (I have done this before and it works fine) but there would be no way to uncloak the ship; if you don't need to do that, it would work fine.

[diamondgeezer]

Originally posted by aldo_14


eh?  Why me?

I thought you did a load of work with stealth stuff a while ago...

[Black_Dragon]

Yeah,  i was making and testing some textures that i did,  when i move the texture with a star background,  it looks like it bends the background,   but i havnt tested it yet with FS2.

My plan is to do some ships to cloak,  maybee it isnt necesary to make it cloak in the middle in the game.   Well, that for me to test it,   but i will still investigating.   And its for capital ships,   fighters will not have the habilities to cloak,  as the story of my campaing.

[Killfrenzy]

Anybody hacked into source code from the following:

Wing Commander 3 (Kilrathi Something cloaked fighter)

Klingon Academy (Guess why! )

Bridge Commander (same reason)

That might give some hints!

Or alternatively, ask the source code boys VERY NICELY to see if they can code in some fade-in/fade-out invisiblity sexps or something.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by diamondgeezer



I thought you did a load of work with stealth stuff a while ago...

I fannied about with it abpout a year back, yeah.  but I never got any decent results.... I even went as far as making a ship with 3 hulls (textured outside, black, textured inside) which could cloak / decloak once, but it never worked......

[Nico]

Originally posted by CP5670
You could easily make cloaked ship by just making all the textures 0-255-0 (I have done this before and it works fine) but there would be no way to uncloak the ship; if you don't need to do that, it would work fine.

note that with voodoo cards, 0 255 0 colour appears... green., so it's a no go, in fact, unfortunately or otherwise I'd have made intensive use of it for various stuff ).

[CP5670]

really? It worked fine on my old computer, which was on a Voodoo3, but I guess if there problems with certain cards then it is no good. (some stealth ship that would be, painted in bright lime green )

[Black Wolf]

I tried doin this awhile ago, 0,255,0 painted all over the Pegasus maps. The idea was to hzve it half visible, half invisible. In PSP, it was green. In MV32, FRED and FS2 - Grey...