[tomcat]

dooh ...the simple way to put it is ..We want to have skinable models:)

[IPAndrews]

Bobboau. When you refer to the "texture index on the model". What exactly do you mean? It doesn't sound like something which would be easy to obtain or keep track of. Would a straight text search and replace not work better?

+alternate_texture:
old_texture, new_texture

ala (at ship class data read time):

for all textures {
for all old textures {
if (texture = old texture) texture = new texture
}
}

What are the difficulties involved with this?

[IPAndrews]

Alright. Tomcat has told me over ICQ that we want SKINS. He also mentioned that if I say SKINS people will understand what I'm talking about. Pardon me for my ignorance. I don't know what I'd do without Tomcat. Probably get on with my life without worrying about frickin' SEMANTICS.

[Fury]

Hey IP, don't forget what general Lefcourt said to Londo "In the Beginning". (about minbari warrior caste)

Hehehehehe...

Well anyway, idea is good. Let's wait what coders says.

[Bobboau]

I'm talking about the section of the pof data that holds the textures being used, every texture is geven a name and a number, once in game it only has the number wich is an index to another number wich is the texture number (another index, so it's an index to an index)

the thing is I don't think the name of the texture is held past the inital loading of the texture, and I already have it nearly set up to work this way, but if you know the name of the texture you want to change you also probly know it's texture number

so you give a texture number (the number in the model of the texture you want to change) and the name of the texture you want it to replace

[Goober5000]

In the same vein, this would probably allow cloaked ships to be implemented.  The cloak-ship sexp would cause every texture on the ship to be replaced with "invisible", and the decloak-ship sexp would restore the original textures.

[Bobboau]

I'd rather have some sort of cool looking efect rather than just "POOF!" gone

[Goober5000]

Yeah, me too.  But effects aside, the final effect will be the same.  We can work on the cloaking effect after we get the actual cloak working.  (Implementing the cloaking effect might be as easy as adding another shield .ani.)

Perhaps an alternative method would be to swap the ship class (and thus the POF) in-mission... e.g. from Pegasus to Pegasus-cloaked.

[Bobboau]

I think it would look better and be easier if we just lowered the alpha level of the textures being rendered over the corse of a few seconds untill they were fully transparent, then just flag the ship not to be rendered

[Goober5000]

Hmm.  I'm not familar with alphas and stuff, but that sounds a lot simpler.  If it works,  then .

[Bobboau]

I have implemented transperency in textures quite a while ago, thugh this sort of thing is the only thing it would likely be good for

[Scuddie]

May I have your attention please...  This thread is now officially
HIJACKED!!




But I have an idea...  Maybe Bobboau can make flags for shipmodels to have custom skins...  Kinda like the glowpoints, but make it look for fighter01-03a-alt1 or something, and a bitflag can determine which skinset is loaded??