[gevatter Lars]

Has their been any progress on the cloaking technic that some here worked on quite some time ago?
The last thing I know is that it works for the player but not for the AI and their where some other problems. Has this been solved?

[phreak]

No, it doesn't work and it probably won't for a long time.

[Black Wolf]

Call me retarded, but... how can it really be that hard?

I know, I know, non coders can never understand how easy or hard something is, and these sort of assertions are the things that irritate you guys the most, but sometimes its useful to step back and reduce a probalem to its bare bones by looking at it through the rose hued glasses of blissful ignorance.

The way I see it, the bare bones of this program are as such: you want to be able to make a ship that is visible become not visible, gradually, and with a fancy animation playing in between. Well... we have animated textures, we have texture switching, and we have EFFs which allow us to store alpha transparency...so what's stopping these sorts of things being combined into a rudimentary cloaking system? You set something up that forces a switch to an animated texture (if neccesary, it can be pre made by the FREDder/modder) with a gradually decreasing opacity provided by EFFs with Alpha mapping (and fancy lightning glowmap effects if desired), and combine it with an AI order to ignore, and the addition of a stealth flag?

I realize if it was this easy it'd probably have been done by now but, aside from being hackish, and effectivly limited to ships with only one map (i.e. fighters, which is where it probably would have found most use anyway) is there anything that stops this kind of system being implemented?

[starfox]

Shadow Battlecrabs could really use that....
And besides that, regular in/out jumping will look lot cooler, as the ship "Fades" in/out of subspace...
Take a look at some briefing anis, and you will get the general idea..."The ani, where Garthage and the Dashor will jump is probably the best"

[Flipside]

I think it's to do with the way the rendering/texture passing system works. I seem to recall Bobboau saying once that the materials system he was thinking about would allow for things like this as well as bump mapping etc. I know the effect has been made to work in FSO, but it was glitchy and had problems.

[Goober5000]

The way I see it, the bare bones of this program are as such: you want to be able to make a ship that is visible become not visible, gradually, and with a fancy animation playing in between. Well... we have animated textures, we have texture switching, and we have EFFs which allow us to store alpha transparency...so what's stopping these sorts of things being combined into a rudimentary cloaking system? You set something up that forces a switch to an animated texture (if neccesary, it can be pre made by the FREDder/modder) with a gradually decreasing opacity provided by EFFs with Alpha mapping (and fancy lightning glowmap effects if desired), and combine it with an AI order to ignore, and the addition of a stealth flag?

Yup, you can do this already, albeit in a very hackish way: use ship-change-model. This was in fact the example I used when posting the sexp in the first place.

Imperial Alliance has a fairly decent cloaking effect working, and we'll be merging their code in eventually, but that's for an undetermined point in the future.

[Trivial Psychic]

The main problem with cloaking, is likely not getting it to work, but making it dynamic and making it AI controllable.  Some mods want a cloaked craft to still have a slight distortion.  Some want it to remain on sensors such as a ship with an "invisible" flag.  The long-standing answer is that these nuances of capabilities belong in a table file, and more specifically as a "Tertiary Weapons System".  Unfortunately, Tertiaries are on a back, back, back burner right now.  The result is a lack of motivation to get cloaking working completely, because it would require so many other features to be included along the way, that it becomes a daunting task.  Add to that, that you'd probably need to recode the AI so that it knows when it should cloak during battle, and how to behave when it is cloaked.

[phreak]

Thanks for typing all of that.  We're using your excuse now.

[gevatter Lars]

For AI behavior. I would say a simple behavior would be enough.
If shields go down to 25% cloak. If shields are back to 50% decloak. Don't fire while cloaked.
For the cloaking effect itsself. I go with the very strict sense of cloaking...its gone. No deistortion while cloaked, no radarblips.

Question would their be a way to work with the opacity of the maps?

[Trivial Psychic]

For AI behavior. I would say a simple behavior would be enough.
If shields go down to 25% cloak. If shields are back to 50% decloak. Don't fire while cloaked.
For the cloaking effect itsself. I go with the very strict sense of cloaking...its gone. No deistortion while cloaked, no radarblips.

Question would their be a way to work with the opacity of the maps?

You see, you may want aspects like this, but other mods might want it different.  For example, if someone was doing a grand Star Trek mod, which covers both Next Gen+ era and TOS era, you'd have quite a range of different and ever evolving cloaks.  There were some realy crappy ones in TOS which didn't even fully cloak the ship visually.  Things like this need to be variable.  As for the AI, such behaviour too isn't necessarily what every MOD would want.  The main thing about upgrading the AI however, is that of all the areas of the code that the SCP team touches, the AI is the most hated and most avoided part there is.  Good luck getting them to even look at it (no insult intended to the SCP team).

[Fieari]

I can think of all sorts of cloaks... visible, partial visible, invisible / no radar blip, radar blip but untargetable / uncloak when firing, never uncloak / cloak uses or doesn't use energy or "ammo" / uncloak when hit, uncloak when damaged, uncloak when sufficiently damaged, damage has no effect on cloaking / cloaking effected by specialized fields or area weapons... the list goes on and on!

Heck, I can also think of plenty of uses for a "Tertiary" slot... speed boosters, radar boosters, armor boosters, shield boosters, the cloaking device, "funnels" (ala gundam)... I'm sure this list could go on too...

[Starman01]

Lars point is, it would be better receiving at least a "rough" version of a cloaking-system than getting nothing, because we are creating a science out of it and want to do everything 1000% perfect. With a simple version, at least every mod could use it and think" man, it's not perfect, but at least it works and I can stick to my universe" It's still better than to have skip away special features or models (of course I talk for my mod in the first place, but I'm sure others may think the same).

Look, I'm not trying to say "code something half-assed, buggy". Just make it simple for the beginning, and then there will be always room for improvement. Isn't that the way things usually go ?

And while speaking of it, forget the AI. It's understandable that this is a hot area coders won't touch, since it can break many things. But  IMO it would be more then enough if we can receive a way where the models fade out slowly (and I have to remind of phreaks first try in this, which was really cool). Once this is done, make some new FRED-SEXP (O.K, I don't know if they can be done that easy, but I hope so) and then the fredder use the "everytime argument " to cloak his ships when the shields are low, and maybe a chained one to uncloak again. I can't imagine that so many cloakable fighters are planned in one mission, so controlling them with SEXP would be a good start.

Personally, I would be happy if I could cloak my ships just once while in a mission (so that not to much scripting is required). It's not perfect, but it would be more than enough. With good scripting a lot of things can simulated.

@Phreak : I really can imagine that you find me annoying , but you once said to me that it would be not that hard to bring it to Direct3D and make those SEXP. Please take another thought into this matter, it would be really a great deal for the WCS Mod and others too 

Though I have never seen your effect in real motion (I know only 3 pictures), I think some sort of inceasing/decreasing map-transparency could also be enough. There is no need for a fancy animation (for the first version that is). The only thing that should be included is a cloak sound, and that could be also done with the SEXP-variant and it should be usable on every ship, not only AI-Ships (and they must cease from firing while cloaked, but certainly that can also be controlled within the same SEXP)

What do you guys think of this solution ?

[Flipside]

If cloaking is to work then I agree, it would have to be a Sexp controlled function. AI is notorious at self-preservation etc, an different types of ships would need to obery different cloaking 'laws'. Bombers, for example would arrive cloaked (assuming you can warp whilst cloaked) and fly in, uncloak (Assuming you cannot fire whilst cloaked) fire, recloak (assuming you can cloak more than once in a mission) and repeat. Even with one type of ship, there are several options at each stage of the AI, arrival, approach, attack and withdraw. To try and get this as an AI feature would require, I feel, a massive amount of time, both on the part of the coders, and of the CPU when it's running as part of the AI engine.

[Starman01]

That's the point. I can't imagine that this amount of AI-rewriting is doable in the near and far future, even if it would be cool. But there would be way to many options to be taken care of. But it would be absolutly unneccessary to approach this project from this direction. I say do it step by step, and SEXP would be fine enough.

Of course, that's just a suggestion

[phreak]

@Phreak : I really can imagine that you find me annoying , but you once said to me that it would be not that hard to bring it to Direct3D and make those SEXP. Please take another thought into this matter, it would be really a great deal for the WCS Mod and others too 

That was before HTL came into being and we actually had a D3D coder.  I haven't looked at cloaking since December when I removed all of the code from the codebase.  TBH, I haven't had much time or willpower to code in new features since I'd rather fix bugs and actually play the game for once.  Its probably going to end up like Bob's shadow build where I get everyone excited, but never actually do anything more than a test.

[gevatter Lars]

We would surely do more then just testing. Cloaking was an importen part of Wing Commander....and I also think that you will do every B5 fan a favor when he is able to have cloaking shadows.
Beside that I would also love to see the shadows again.

[Trivial Psychic]

We would surely do more then just testing. Cloaking was an importen part of Wing Commander....and I also think that you will do every B5 fan a favor when he is able to have cloaking shadows.
Beside that I would also love to see the shadows again.

Or, not see them, in fitting with this thread.

[gevatter Lars]

I didn't mean that shadows ^_^
I would like to see shadows but not THE Shadows...but then if you see THE Shadows its mostly to late for you anyway.