[Knight Templar]

Nebula: Can we get a nebula field that is liek teh Asteroid field in which you can put one in a mission, thus making the player able to fly in and out of it in mission? This would be perfect for missions with gas clouds, wanting atmospheres, small nebulas, or ice ring fields.

Asteroid Fields: How about upping the number of allowed asteroids? 256 isn't a lot for a field 10km^3. And/or adding the option of multiple fields. 1 field per mission kinda sucks and limits what you can do. This would be cool if this could be done with the cloud/nebula idea too.


Agreements? Complaints?

[IceFire]

Biggest problem with the max asteroid value is that , it itself doesn't work properly.  If you go for the max value + ships in a mission...you are going to find in most cases that the asteroids will not have collision detection and neither will your ships.

Upping the limit will need many fixes past just setting a higher value.

A "good idea" but with more implications

I'd love to be able to fly in and out of a nebula...but I don't think thats possible the way nebulas are rendered at the moment.

[Knight Templar]

Asteroids: well i guess there's a lot of work to do then. Good thing summer is here

Nebula: I really don't know what I'm talking about, but couldn't we just have a pof like the asteroids of a nebula like thingy, and then make it misty or spread really thin ?

[KARMA]

i asked too ages ago for nebulas like clouds, where you fly in and out, but random tiger explained clearly in the engine overhauls post how nebulas work, and i don't think it will be possible without a completely different nebula system, since the actual one is just a special way to render things used by the engine to simulate a fog effect.
I don't know how the fog is created in other games, for example the smoke grenade in counterstrike, i mean, if it is a similar rendering system that can be limited on certain areas

[kasperl]

Originally posted by Knight Templar
Asteroids: well i guess there's a lot of work to do then. Good thing summer is here

Nebula: I really don't know what I'm talking about, but couldn't we just have a pof like the asteroids of a nebula like thingy, and then make it misty or spread really thin ?

i'm no coder, but i heard things, and i played around with basic, so here's what i think:

Asteroids, nope, this has been discussed before, and can't be solved without major peformance issues on machnes with small to normal amounts of RAM

Nebula: doubtfull, now, nebs are made by overlaying pictures of the neb over the normal rendered picture, i geuss. so that would have to be changed if you were to make transitions.

now, i am on shaky ground here, since i never looked at the FS code, and i don't know C or any graphical programminfg language, and i never, ever, used 3D.

basicly, forget this, and ask a real coder.

edit: darn, Karma beat me to it.

[diamondgeezer]

How's about making less dense fog, ie. with better visibilty, enabling missions to be set in the edge of a nebula? Would this be a case of simply making the engine lay less nebula images over top of everything?

[Anaz]

the neb field doesn't seem like it would be too hard...just a (huge) array of polygons with a small amount of alpha transparency w/ their normals facing towards the camera. So it basically wouldn't use the same system as for the rest of the neb stuff, but it would work. Might have a performance issue, but I think that'd work.

About asteroids - what if there were "ghost" asteroids that were displayed beyond the range of the pilot, just stored as an XYZ coord, and displayed a single polygon w/ an asteroid texture on it. perhaps if the player decided to fly closer to said asteroid, the coords would be bumped into a different structure, and be given a polymodel. But there would only be 256 modeled asteroids at any given time. Might look kinda cheap, but I think it'd work.

Again, I have no real 3d programming experience, but I'm trying to learn.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Analazon
About asteroids - what if there were "ghost" asteroids that were displayed beyond the range of the pilot, just stored as an XYZ coord, and displayed a single polygon w/ an asteroid texture on it. perhaps if the player decided to fly closer to said asteroid, the coords would be bumped into a different structure, and be given a polymodel. But there would only be 256 modeled asteroids at any given time. Might look kinda cheap, but I think it'd work.

Depends on what you mean by range of the pilot. The problem AFAIK is what happens if a ship decides to fly into one of these ghost asteroids. Most likely he'd fly straight through it as there probably wouldn't be any collision detection on them.

[Anaz]

Originally posted by karajorma


Depends on what you mean by range of the pilot. The problem AFAIK is what happens if a ship decides to fly into one of these ghost asteroids. Most likely he'd fly straight through it as there probably wouldn't be any collision detection on them.

if the asteroids have an "average" radius, then couldn't that be used for collision detection? see if distance(ai_ship, asteroid) < asteroid radius?

[vyper]

The problem with the nebulae is that the only real fogging going on is for ships vanishing into the distance (I think). The rest is (A) a small pof (stretched big) that in effect "contains" the nebula with a neb background (its called spherec.pof I believe), (B) the gas poofs are just bitmaps rendered in front of the player's view. Ergo, it ain't a real fog that you could step into and out of.


Disclaimer: Until December 2003 I still know nothing about coding in C, so I may be wrong about all of this

[Anaz]

Originally posted by vyper
The problem with the nebulae is that the only real fogging going on is for ships vanishing into the distance (I think). The rest is (A) a small pof (stretched big) that in effect "contains" the nebula with a neb background (its called spherec.pof I believe), (B) the gas poofs are just bitmaps rendered in front of the player's view. Ergo, it ain't a real fog that you could step into and out of.


Disclaimer: Until December 2003 I still know nothing about coding in C, so I may be wrong about all of this

that's exactly what I'm trying to address. It wouldn't use a .pof, it would be a special engine generated effect. I propose to use semi transparent polygons to create the effect in an area, different from how FS2 renders it. What I say to do is to have several polygons all arranged to cover any holes that the others would leave, that all have their normals (the direction from which they are visible) pointed towards the camera, so it looks like nebula going off in all directions.

[KARMA]

Originally posted by diamondgeezer
How's about making less dense fog, ie. with better visibilty, enabling missions to be set in the edge of a nebula? Would this be a case of simply making the engine lay less nebula images over top of everything?

i think that this probably can be already done w/o any scp hack, just work on the nebulae poofs in the vp files to reduce the density appearance, probably you can even make a nebula look like a group of clouds...probably...wasn't there something like this in the robotech mod?

[IceFire]

Originally posted by KARMA

i think that this probably can be already done w/o any scp hack, just work on the nebulae poofs in the vp files to reduce the density appearance, probably you can even make a nebula look like a group of clouds...probably...wasn't there something like this in the robotech mod?

There is still a draw distance...even if you totally wipe out the bitmaps into virtual nothingness you still can't see very far.

A brighter better defined background really shows up...but objects, weapons, etc do not.

[Fry_Day]

Originally posted by Analazon


that's exactly what I'm trying to address. It wouldn't use a .pof, it would be a special engine generated effect. I propose to use semi transparent polygons to create the effect in an area, different from how FS2 renders it. What I say to do is to have several polygons all arranged to cover any holes that the others would leave, that all have their normals (the direction from which they are visible) pointed towards the camera, so it looks like nebula going off in all directions.

What you're describing is a particle system with large particles. I've already been thinking along those lines, but you must remember that alpha blending is slooow - a particle system with large amounts of large particles can bring a GeForce4 down to its knees, let alone older video cards. Of course, since such particles will be drawn not with a plain additive blending (since that isn't very good for fog), some sort of sorting for polygons (since if you use real transparency, the drawing order does matter) would have to be implemented, and that's a pain.
More feasible would be to use some OpenGL extensions for volumetric fog with a small amount of particles, but that, of course, would throw away support for older cards, and I have no idea about how to implement such a thing in Direct3D (And what I know about implementing it in OpenGL is vague, to say the least... )