[Nuke]

my new superjug uses transparent textures on its main beam turrets and as forcefields covering the docking bays, the problem is that they seem to render behind the ship geometry instead of over it. they look normal when space is behind them , but if the ship gets in the way you can no longer see them. ill try to post a pic later (probibly should use mantis on this one).

[Bobboau]

ship hulls are rendered after subobjects, transparent textures are only partaly implemented, as you have found

[Nuke]

so then a mantis entry is not required?

[Nuke]

hey, wasnt there a way to get them to render certain subobjects last so that you can have windows and stuff? does that still work?

[Bobboau]

no, and NA,
hull is always drawn last, right after the subobjects in the order they are found in the model, getting alpha blending to work corectly is a MAJOR thing, so you have to make up the diference when you build your ship keeping the render order in mind, and that the polys within a texture are all rendered at the same time but it's sort of hard to define wich texture goes first. so the only realy safe way to do things is to have your alpha blending on the hull and the stuff behind the alpha blending in a subobject.

[Nuke]

you see im using animated textures to simulate a forcfield over the caverous fighterbay. it the rear of the ship is a reactor the player has to destroy, but he has to first brave flak guns and beam turrets to disable the field to enter the bay. the only way to do that is to have a subobject to act asthe field. i could probibly get away with making a shield object. now the bem turrets use the same texture, but there i could copy the meshes, flip the normals and use a different texture. that way the outer shell is transparent, but you cant see past the far boundry and therefore the ship through it.i could then mask that with a glow effect of sorts.

now is alpha blending on the adjenda in the near future? or would it be wise to modify the ship, which is far from done anyway. if i leave it the way it is it could give me more hedaches later.

*edit*

come to think of it the sheild idea wont work is there a way to fool the renderer into thinking its a shield mesh while still behaving as a subobject. a hack solution to hold off untill full alpha blending gets implemented.

[Nico]

nah, no matter what you do, you won't get anything from the same ship showing thrugh a transparent part with the current builds.
Well, as far as my own experiments went.

[Bobboau]

yeah you can

[Taristin]

I'll have to disect this, and see. I've been trying to get a cocpit in the Kessy for a while now...

[Bobboau]

it's very simple the stuff behind the transparent stuff is in it's own subobject, the transparent stuff is part of the main hull, if you can fenagle it so that the transparent section is in it's own texture and that texture is the last in the list (for the main hull) it'll work even better.

[Taristin]

We're trying to implement this in TVWP a little. I think that today I officially have a working version, that functions as it should. Which is good.