[Lynx]

Cloaking should give a tactical advantage. If you make it useless, putting it iin would make no sense.

[WMCoolmon]

Having never tried out cloaking before, I have to ask - how do you use it? The instructions in the wiki didn't work, it told me it was disabled and thanked me for playing.

[kasperl]

probably because the higher level stuff isn't implemented, according to bob.

[IceFire]

I LIKE IT....even Wing Commander 3 and StarLancer have done these things.  The cloak is not 100% (or try Halo which has a adaptive camoflage) and there is some associated eyecandy.  Even some of the earlier Star Trek cloaks (Star Trek 3) had the cloak create some kind of visual disturbance on the viewscreen.  So I like the idea and I like the implementation!  Sounds great!

[ShadowDrakken]

I'm thinking here that if the cloaking is on the skin of the ship, it wouldn't effect teh engine glow at all... engine glow would still be visible since the device doing the cloaking doesn't cover them.

However, if the cloak were part of the shield system instead (ala StarTrek) then the engine glow would also be masked.  However, I think if you make the cloak part of the shield system, then you should do the texturing to the shield mesh instead of the ship model

[Taristin]

Showing the thruster is stupid. Hate to be so blunt, but that's negating the cloaking. Even Starcraft cloaked the thrusters on the Wraith. But to even it out, the cloaking didn't last forever. Which is how it should be. I think so, atleast.

[Lightspeed]

IMHO:

Cloaking = only fighter size vessels
Cloaking = no afterburner possible without decloaking
Cloaking = no weapons
Cloaking = decreasing ship energy while active - when it reaches "0" it will uncloak.

And yeah, cloak the thrusters too

[Taristin]

I'd have to agree...

[ShadowDrakken]

I agree the thrusters should be cloaked because otherwise it makes it fundamentally useless, I'm just adding that in order to realistically cloak the engine emissions, the shield should do the cloaking, not the ship's hull... makes it a lot more logical

[Bobboau]

well this is all something of a moot point becase I just had a lockup and the file with the cloaking effect in it just god absolutlely destroied, so I't gona be a while untill I even get a working build again.

[ShadowDrakken]

well just think Bob, the second time should be that much easier right?

[IceFire]

Originally posted by Lightspeed
IMHO:

Cloaking = only fighter size vessels
Cloaking = no afterburner possible without decloaking
Cloaking = no weapons
Cloaking = decreasing ship energy while active - when it reaches "0" it will uncloak.

And yeah, cloak the thrusters too

Agree with everything....except that having a cloaking capital ship may freak someone out sometime.  Remember in WC4, the cloaking electronic warfare ship.

[Viper1000]

Or you could do the Homeworld wireframe for your cloak!:D

[Trivial Psychic]

Originally posted by Lightspeed
IMHO:

Cloaking = only fighter size vessels
Cloaking = no afterburner possible without decloaking
Cloaking = no weapons
Cloaking = decreasing ship energy while active - when it reaches "0" it will uncloak.

And yeah, cloak the thrusters too

IMO, there should be no absolutes, as (I mentioned in my earlier post) many mods would like cloaks to have different properties and drawbacks.  These should be expressed in a table entry, so in theory one mod could have more than one type of cloak.  Returning to Star Trek, the early Romulan cloaks would still leave a non-targettable blip on the radar, while the cheap copy the Klingons had for one episode of TOS, would leave the ship still partially visible.  Furthermore, most cloaks require a ship to drop shields while its active, but some Klingon designs can retain shields during cloak (TNG episode, season 4 finale, Klingon Civil war, Kurn's BOP fires on another which is cloaked and hits its shields), or the Scimitar from the last movie.  Also, most cloaks do not allow a ship to fire, but the Scimitar and the BOP from ST6 are exceptions.

My point is, that all of these factors must be up to the MODer to decide, and not the coder.

Later!

[Tolwyn]

Originally posted by Lightspeed
Cloaking = only fighter size vessels
Cloaking = no afterburner possible without decloaking

it would be more mod freindly if this could be specified in the tbl

[Setekh]

Dude, the implementation for this is absolutely perfect. Here's to hoping you can get it working again later.

[Bobboau]

I had it almost absolutely perfict before the crash, I had it so the distortion could be adgusted by a vaarialbe so it could be phased in untill it matched the backgound perfictly, from there it could start alpha blending untill you were totaly invisable, eh... it took me all day twiddleing around with assorted matrices, there's no way I'm gona have the time to retool it till next weekend, and that'll be the last week I have off (school) for two months. man I've been up for nearly 20 hours and I have work in another 3, and I just can't get too sleep, as I type I feel realy tierd but as soo as I lay down I feel all jumpy and energetic, my life sucks

I think I fixed most of the other damage that crash caused, but sence then it's been locking like that every hour or so, I've had it do this a few times before it suddenly starts doing it then it suddenly stops doing it again, the thing starts makeing the clicking noies that sounds sort of like the click it makes when the power shuts off but it does it two or three times a second and the activity light is on full, within seconds every program stops responding and after a minute or two the mouse freizes too, the only way to get my computer back is to manualy shut off the power, if it locks when in the middle of saveing something (like d3d.cpp) the file is usualy totaly gone, it's like it gets caught in some realy low level infinite loop that just keeps drawing more and more power. but it's got to be a hardware issue with that clicking sound.

[Sticks]

Sounds like the classic "click of death" right before a hard disk crashes. I'd back everything up quick.

[ShadowDrakken]

I've only heard of "click of death" applied to Zip and Jaz drives... but I suppose since a HDD works the same basic way...

I was thinking essentially the same thing, that it's likely a dying harddrive, ost likely the controller, so rescue what you can, while you can.

Another, less likely, possibility is a short in the power supply, equally dangerous, if not moreso since it can damage multiple components within the system. It would sound similar, but I say less likely because I imagine you would have worse problems than just locking up.

[Flaser]

I had the same "click" with an IBM SCSI hard drive, so I guess it can happen to harddrives too - it must be some pretty rare mechanical failure that creates the noise.