[Petrarch of the VBB]

How about a nice friendly glowpoint contest?

The challenge will be to produce the best glowpointed ship. However, everyone will have to work on the same ship to make it fair.
I suggest the Uly.

The question is, who will judge? It can't be me, as I am going to enter, it will have to be some one completely unbiased. Of course, all sorts of shady deals might go on through PMs, so the judges might not be clear minded.

Hmm, maybe this isn't such a good idea....

[WMCoolmon]

It's a risk you take with every contest, internet or RL alike.

It would be a much more valuable, imho, if the contest included more ships, so that the best glowpointed version of each ship could be added to future fs2_open releases.

[Martinus]

[color=66ff00]I'm the spirit of impartiality, I'll judge if you want.
[/color]

I take paypal, cashiers checks and postal orders, amounts less than £100UK will be scoffed at.

[Goober5000]

Mebbe add an animated texture category.  I'd love to see a cloaking ship...

[Killfrenzy]

You're not the only one. If somebody can get cloaks to work effectively AND tell me how to do it, I will love them forever!

[Goober5000]

Originally posted by Killfrenzy
You're not the only one. If somebody can get cloaks to work effectively AND tell me how to do it, I will love them forever!

Oh, cloaks work in 3.5. All you have to do is use the change-ship-model sexp, and change something from a conventional ship model to an invisible ship model.

However, it's not cool to see a ship suddenly pop from uncloaked to cloaked.  What would be really cool would be to see an intermediate stage of the ship actually cloaking. Animated textures fill this need nicely.

[Killfrenzy]

That's what I meant.

And how do you make a ship "invisible?"

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Killfrenzy
That's what I meant.

And how do you make a ship "invisible?"

Change all it's textures to invisible should do it

[Killfrenzy]

[Hippo]

Originally posted by Goober5000

However, it's not cool to see a ship suddenly pop from uncloaked to cloaked.  What would be really cool would be to see an intermediate stage of the ship actually cloaking. Animated textures fill this need nicely.

Similar to romulan or klingon vessles? the shimmery thing?

[Goober5000]

Yup. Or whatever other cloaking effect you desire.

[WMCoolmon]

Normal ship model -> model with shimmery animated textures -> cloaked model.

Simplest way to do it that I see.

[cough]Back on topic,[/cough ] perhaps it could be a general ship-improvement contest, rather than a specific aspect? The best of the submitted entries of each class could be added to fs2_open, and the best ship overall could become the fs2_open flagship. (Hopefully the best-looking entry is not a cargo container )

[Black Wolf]

Animated textures don't actually fill this nieche nicely, unless our friendly neighbourhood coders have added some sort of translucent texturing system. As it stands, there's only the one shade of green that is actually transparent and no intermediate translucent ones.

Closest you could come would be a fade to black, then the last frame pure green, but this would look crappy against anything but an empty starscape - ie. against planets, nebulae, suns, in a full nebula etc.

Unless of course the coders have or will be implementing translucency colours.

[Goober5000]

Instead of doing it that way, you could have parts of the hull swirl and become instantly transparent, gradually propagating over the entire hull.

[KARMA]

but transparency wasn't implemented by bobbau sometime ago?

[Martinus]

[color=66ff00]Do you actually want them to be completely invisible, half the fun in starlancer was blasting those silly russkies that thought that simply because you couldn't get a lock on them, they were hard to see, and they moved quickly, you couldn't kill them.

Mostly translucent ships that constantly shimmer would be better IMHO.
[/color]

[Black Wolf]

Hmmm - I actually just thought of another way around it - you could have thetransparency sort of pass along it, from left to right. It'd look very sixties sci-fi but I'd work. 'Twould be a ***** with complex UV Maps though...

[J3Vr6]

Is there any way we can possibly get back on topic, please?  Maybe a different topic should be opened to talk about how one would make a cloaked ship.  I'm not trying to be rude, but I think this idea from Petrach is a great way to get a lot of people involved that aren't imeediately part of the SCP (ie. people who don't know how to code but want to at least contribute what they can) as well as greatly benefit the use of the glowpoint feature in FSSCP.

I'd love to see what everyone can come up with in terms of glowpoints.

[Goober5000]

Make some nice runway lights on the Orion.

[Petrarch of the VBB]

Back to the contest. do you want it or not?

I like the idea of a general ship improvement contest. But, as I said, it would all have to be done on the same ship, to make it fair. This is because different ships could be improved in different ways, and so some would be better than others.