[LAW ENFORCER]

they have the 'style' of them but ingame they feel wishy washy and bland - bright and smooth yes but I never liked them for a REAL space game

the current thrusters have problems are not very good looking and would be better if they were replaced but I would hate it if FL style ones replaced them!


Incidently I had a friend over the other day - I installed FL on two systems to play. (we were board). After an hour of getting used to controls and talking and flying and stuff.... he had exhausted the entire game and what it had to offer... he said "this game is absoutly rubbish! Its so repeative!" He never said that about any other game....

Flipside - Another thing I noticed about FL was the nebulae backgrounds.... there was ONE background that had any amount of open black space! it was annyoing! Like a FS2 mission with FAR TOO MANY nabulae! Yes the localised nebulas ARE a good point in FL though

[Nico]

question of taste, please do not turn this thread into a "FL sux0r!!!!" flamewar.
as for how the AB look like, it's up to the one who draws the bitmap.

[LAW ENFORCER]

dont worry, I dont think FL sux, the single player saved it somewhat - I was just lied to and it was over hyped but enought of that

what 'technique' does that use and how much control over it do you have

(I think its a particle geneorator and other people have said that too)

and why do particles to have such loose trajecories? you can change that right?

[Taristin]

Originally posted by Venom
question of taste, please do not turn this thread into a "FL sux0r!!!!" flamewar.
as for how the AB look like, it's up to the one who draws the bitmap.

Actually, if you could implement something like that just without those lame rings around th ethrusters it'd be freakin awesome...

[Nico]

the rings are when afterburners are engage. real jets sometimes show the same kind of rings when they engage their AB ( well, actually, they're always there, but they're usually dificult to see. they lok like they're slowly going back and fade away ):

bad pic, sorry


they look more like rugby balls there, it's odd...

[Flipside]

Yes, it's something to do with Stutterfeeding air into the ignition chamber, but I can't remember the physics of it I became out-of-date when they stopped using pitot-static systems to measure altitude etc

Hmmmmm... I'm going to post this in the Source Code section, I'll probs just get laughed at, but if they could create a modder-definable particle system (i.e. The modder defines the 'widget' bitmap and it's in-game size, the spew rate, velocity (For each axis), lifetime etc), not only could you use these for thrusters, you could also have something like a Waypoint object, which is the source of the particle emitter, possibly even set it's values in Fred as well

Flipside

[Flaser]

A particle system could wastly improve the look of energy weapons, since designers could finally achieve a lot more complex looking shots (hmm...lightning storm? - fractals can do wonders).

[LAW ENFORCER]

well im pretty sure that 'air' wont be a problem with the ships im doing.... (well MOST of them;) )

yeah im for particle stuff - (why do i always say thats crap! and then think why is it crap? and then think ah its good as long as...)


The thruster 'swung' in FL didn't it? I want it to be 'rigid' in my TC so the ability to fine tune every part of the PS would be better than just replacing the thrusters... which is obvious but where else is Captain Obvious and his side kick Duh going to get work?

[Flipside]

Hmmmm.... Rigid Thrusters are a bit more difficult than 'bendy' ones. A standard particle thruster would just drop 1 bitmap every frame, which would fade to transparent over, e.g. 60 frames. This means that when the ship turns, the bitmap stays where it was dropped, causing a 'curved' effect.
Rigid thrusters are usually not particle systems, they are done in the same way as the FS2 thrusters, only brighter If you were to do a particle system for 'straight' thrusters, you would have to compute a point far behind the 'back' of the ship and constantly change the trajectory of the particles towards that point, I think it would be quite CPU hungry alas

Flipside

[LAW ENFORCER]

I know, thats why I was 'against' it in the first place...

I never liked (read hated) freelancer's 'bendy engy':doubt:

[Flipside]

True, but anything has got to be better than British Gas adverts that vanish on a whim

Flipside

[LAW ENFORCER]

whats wrong with brittish gas?
*snaps finger and thumb*

*gas runs out*

ah....

[Flipside]

LOL Yep, that's pretty much what happens in Freespace as well

Flipside

[Goober5000]

*bump*

I found this post on the old FDL list that talks about making thrusters before they had any WYSIWYG POF editors.

http://ml.warpcore.org/fdl/199906/msg00000.html

Note this particular point...

These special thruster textures CANNOT BE TILED.  If a thruster texture
does not fit the face it is applied to without tiling, it will not be
displayed, and you will have an invisible thruster flame.

I assume that this means the thruster subobjects have to be a particular size so that the texture will fit onto them.  But the ships in FS have all different sizes and shapes (c.f. Pegasus vs. Herc II).  So what does this mean, exactly?

[Goober5000]

More information:

Thrusters whose faces are too large to display thruster anis without
tiling will have invisible faces (although they are still there).  So,
you'll need to have small thrusters.

Remember, too, that they can only face in one direction.

As a rule of thumb, the Faustus thrusters are the largest that Volition
uses.

Does this mean that it's only the size of the polygons that matters?  So you can't have a thruster poly bigger than 64x64?

[karajorma]

What it means is that you can't have a repeating texture.
In truespace the values are called U repts and V repts. Both of these must be set to 1. Any higher will cause invisible thrusters.

Just for completeness I'll try to explain what the number means.

In the first picture the repetions are set to U16 V4.


When I change the values to U16 V16 the texture is repeated more often.
 

If I changed the U value the same thing would happen but vertically.

What most likely happened was the the default UV mapping on the thruster was wrong and whoever made the ship compensated by simply having more repeatitions. That works in Truespace (or whatever modeller was used) but in FS2 it won't work.

[Goober5000]

So re-UV-mapping a bad fighter will cause thrusters to properly show up?

[Flipside]

Hopefully so, just make sure you don't tile it.

I seem to recall I got thrusters working on a ship once though, and then they just vanished a few days later

All I can say is thank God for SCP

Flipside

[karajorma]

Yeah it should work if the problem is the one you quoted. If it's a different problem with similar symptoms then who knows?

 Keep the old pof and it should just be a 5-10 minute job to change the UV map, re-pof and import all the chunks back in with PCS

[TrashMan]

FL is great....

Bendy thrusters are more realistic than rigid ones....