[Trekker]

Hi, i did do a search on the forum for cloack and did not come up with much.


Can someone tell me the limitations of the cloacking?


E.G. does it stop your weapons firing and or lower your sheild

[IPAndrews]

Do you mean cloaking or clocking?

[Pnakotus]

AHAHAHAHAHA - isn't 'everything works like Star Trek' disease wonderful?  HAHAHAHA... *sighs*

[Trekker]

ment cloaking lol

[phreak]

it was in for a bit a long time ago.  I took it out since we could do better with HT&L

[Trekker]

so cloaking no longer is possible?

[Hellbender]

Cloaking poses a few problems in a multiplayer environment anyway:

Freelancer  has a total invisibility cloak, with no restraints on usage - it was never intended for multiplayer, but of course some enterprising modders enabled it - and now it is about the biggest cuss word in reference to the game. There has been huge ammounts of effort involved in keeping it off the servers.

Starlancer, predecessor to Freelancer had the "trek" style cloaking - almost. There was not total invisibility, but you couldn't fire while cloaked. The ship also either had it built in or it did not, and the ones that had it were rather poorly armed.

I think I liked the implimentation of cloaking in Starsiege - late 90's mech shooter - better, cloaks could be equipped on any vehicle, but had major power requirements. These also did not have total invisibility, and firing while cloaked would cause the cloak to shut down.

It's not that I think that "trek" style cloaking is the only way to go if it gets beyond the experimental stages, the main point is where Freespace is a multiplayer game, limitations are kind of needed to avoid giving too much advantage to players who use the cloaks.

Personally I'd like to see the FS2O engine eventually evolve to the point where the ship primary and secondary systems are fully customizable buy the player, but evolution takes time, and willingness to work on it.

The folks working on things right now are doing a wonderful job updating and pushing the source code along. One thing I've learned from being here is that no matter how forcibly a feature is put off as impossible, or how loudly an idea is put down, you never know what may come out of the coder's creativity.

[Col. Fishguts]

Originally posted by PhReAk
it was in for a bit a long time ago.  I took it out since we could do better with HT&L

Then do something better with HTL. *whipslash*

TBP needs that for phasing in/out Shadow ships.

[WMCoolmon]

Bobb added some nifty DirectX cloaking in awhile back IIRC. It was only in his local codebase though.

[Bobboau]

I had a little hard drive problem at the last instant that totaly wiped out my cloak effect, but we may get a new cloak effect after I get that shader system working

[Pnakotus]

Frankly, FS-style EM stealth is fine.  If you're not on their radar, and they can't lock you, dogfighting is very easy.  Whats not to like?

[WMCoolmon]

Well, without much effort, you could do something like what happened with the Orion (I think it's Bobb's hi-poly one) on my bloopers page. Env-mapping gone wrong, but in-mission it looked like some sort of cloaking effect...

[Bobboau]

my origonal cloaking effect was very similar to the environment mapping effect

[Taristin]

To... make the textures invisible, but keep the environment mapping intact?

[WMCoolmon]

You'd also have to rotate it 180 degrees or so to make it look right.

[Gregster2k]

I never really liked that method of cloaking personally and I think its a stopgap solution at best until the SCP finally implements programmable shader support which will then enable cloaking devices of any kind you like from any sci-fi inspiration be it Star Trek or Starlancer, Freelancer or Starseige....

[Trekker]

cloaking would be very cool, would allow a realistic Star trek mod to be made.

ATm using fred to reproduce the battle from first contact when they try taking out the borg cube.  So far so good though need a few more ST ship as i using soem FS2 ship until the ST ships i need are made.

[Starman01]

Sorry for bumping this old thread up, but I think it's better to continue this here instead of making a new one.

WCS would also be in need of a working cloaking effect. Currently we skipped the kilrathi-cloaking fighter (actually my favourite ) completly in the mod and the mission-script. But I think that this is a real loss to our project, so I just wanted to ask if you guys are actually planning on doing a cloaking system let's say within the next 15 months or so

If we knew, that it would come someday, then we can at least model the fighter and built it into the script. I'm harassing Phreak for some time now, but he now said that his original cloaking code isn't addaptable into the HT&L engine.

Even if his old code had some nice effects (from what I see from the 3 pictures he once releases ), I think it would be already sufficient having a ship vanishing slowly before your eyes, compared with some cloaking-sound effect. Nothing special, just let it fade out in 2 or 3 seconds (no instant vanishing).

From what I read here, Bob's enviroment-code could already be some start for it,  I guess more complex would be, making it useable on AI-Fighter and/or with SEXP so another FRED-Change would be required too (would be cool if AI-Fighters with cloaking capability will cloak from time to time to get behind the player, but AFAIK changes to AI aren't easy at all). Question is, what will happen with the thrusterflames ? Will they vanish too, or will they be visibile even when the ship is cloaked ?

Like I see it, this could be a good improvement for every project, and besides us TBP needs something like that too for the shadows, when I read it correct in the other forum.

So, if you guys can give us at least some hope, I would really appreciate that

Thanks.

Starman©

[Nuke]

i think were waiting on the materials system for this. once theres a way to render the effect then there really isnt anything stopping them from finishing it. i personally am still waiting on the tertiary weapon system .

[Starman01]

Originally posted by Nuke
i personally am still waiting on the tertiary weapon system .

Shouldn't this be already in the newest build ? I thought it is.