Ok, I am very interested in cloaking lately and here are some procedures and thoughts and questions I have on the procedures. Please, if there are any missing, post them here.
1. The green sphere.
It was thought up by Warlock and a few others and seems to be the most popular method. You create a green sphere to go over your shield orb. Then you add a special subsystem that can be destroyed to disable the sphere and you can disable and enable the subsystem for AI controled fighters. However the downside to this is, will it disable the shields or effect other shield orbs? Would the sphere just show up as see through or would it actually hide the model under it as well?
2. The green skin.
What about creating a skin of a ship by just taking the cob fighter and creating a sub-model of the ship where it uses the green texture that replaces the other model when the cloak is active and it is triggered by a sub-system? How do sub-systems work exactly?
3. The black sphere:
This is the same as above but instead it is a black sphere and you can't see through it. The only problem is that the black sphere will show up in nebulas or with nebula backgrounds.
4. The black ship:
The same as the green ship theory, however the texture is black and can be seen in nebulas.
5. The blue sphere:
This one I came up with. I think if I am correct that engine glow textures you can see through. I have seen a comet model made using this to it's advantage. Why not create a sphere for cloaking with this but the shield glow part would have to be made a very very very light shade of glow so that it almost can't be seen.
6. The blue ship:
The same as the green ship theory, however you use a the light engine glow to texture the model with instead.
Black beam cannon glow:
This is where you place a beam cannon in the center of a ship. You color the glow black so that it covers the whole fighter. However it can be seen in nebula backgrounds and could potentially effect other beam cannon glows.
All of these can be triggered for the player by useing the keypress to his advantage. However the enemy AI would see them. They also can all be triggered in AI players with the use of subsystems.
Here is one that is only for AI ships and was thought up by myself:
Take a ship and mark it as having no warp effect and mark it as red alert carry status.
Make it a reinforcement unit and tell it to warp out when triggered by being either fired upon or by time limit with no warp effect. Then tell the reinforcement to come in after the first one warps out. I am hoping with red alert status that it would show up again with the same shielding and hull integrity as it left with. However, it would probably return in the same spot that it appeared the first time so it would take some coordination for it to work. Also it is untested so far and remains a theory. It also wouldn't be as cool as the others but it would be a working alternative. Also it could be made better by the use of coding it but we don't seem to have many coders to do this.
Any help in this area and anyone that would be interested in helping me make a cloaking effect. Please help me. It is crucial to my campaign. Also, any discussion here would help so there isn't any obliagation to anyone to help. Just please do if you can. Thanx!
