[Trivial Psychic]

Howdy All:

I was recently helping a friend setting up FSO and the latest eye candy (the friend who in fact, introduced me to FS in the first place) and he noted that we don't see the ambient glow from ship engines, when you're not looking directly at the engines, say from behind.  I seem to recall that this disappeared sometime around the introduction of the first 3.6.9 release candidates.  I recall that a few people noticed and brought it up, others replied that they hadn't noticed until it was brought up, and a few even said that they liked it better this way.  After that, there wasn't too much discussion about the subject.  Has there been any attempts to restore this visual effect?

[miskat]

I, for one, would love to see it.

More eye-candy == more awesome frantic action scenes!

[Wanderer]

Apparently the earlier behaviour of the ambient glow (type 3, omnidirectional ball) was a bug. To get those back you may have edit the thruster radius factors in each ship entry in ships.tbl

[taylor]

As Wanderer stated, this was a bug which got fixed.  The problem was that for tertiary glows the values for angle and radius were reversed.  So a tbl value setting a radius would have nothing to do with radius but instead apply to the angle.  There won't be any code changes to resolve this problem, since we already did that, and no functionality was removed or broken in the process.  Any remaining issue is simply a data problem.

All you need to do is fix the tbl values to replicate the old way that it looked.  This should be much easier to do now since the values would actually have the intended affect.

[DaBrain]

BTW... has anybody worked on this table already? I'd like to include it in the MV packs.

[Bobboau]

angle and radius were suposed to be linked...

[taylor]

angle and radius were suposed to be linked...

Linked?  The problem was that the call to geometry_batcher.draw_bitmap() was passing the radius value to angle and the angle value to radius, for the tertiary thruster only.  Do you mean that it was supposed to do that?  If so then why?

[Tolwyn]

the problematic part about this is that tertiary thruster glow does not work on capital ships. Is this intended?

[taylor]

the problematic part about this is that tertiary thruster glow does not work on capital ships. Is this intended?

Nope, and I have no idea why it wouldn't.  I don't think that I've noticed it not working yet so I'll have to look into that.

[Tolwyn]

Well, I couldn't get them to work, not on cap ships at least. And now that I think of it: only trail thrusters in TGA format will be rendered in OpenGL mode. Not that I would bother about them, but...

[Wanderer]

Just tested...  All three thrusterglows work both on fighters and on capships. Tested with fs2_open_3_6_9-7dot9x.exe using OpenGL and TGA graphics.

And the scaling works also. Tertiary thruster is actually rather meaningless currently as it is very difficult to see as its so microscopic


EDIT:

Example: GTC Aeolus using single graphics file for all the glows


The tiny specs are the tertiary glows...

[Tolwyn]

that's the point. They are visible on fighters, but not on cap ships.

[Wanderer]

It seems like the tertiary glow wouldnt be scaled according to the set thruster radius value at all unlike all the other thrusterglows. That is there is no 'automatic scaling' like with primary and secondary glows but instead you have to set $Thruster03 Radius factor: to proper values

[Tolwyn]

in other words: greater values are required for for tertiary glow? I.e. I used values around 1.0 for the first two glows, but I may need to use greater values for the third glow? I can't try it out at the moment, since I am at work

[Col. Fishguts]

Yup, I just checked. Tertiary glows are still working on capships but are very tiny. I'm not sure if it should be scaled like the other glows, or if it's just a matter of table editing.

[Tolwyn]

confirmed, you have to use higher values on capital ships

[Bobboau]

oh what has happened to my poor beautiful thruster effects
were any of the changes ever discused, cause I don't remember any discussion on the subject, I vaugely remember someone decideing to have them turned off by default, but that was about it.

angle and radius were suposed to be linked...

Linked?  The problem was that the call to geometry_batcher.draw_bitmap() was passing the radius value to angle and the angle value to radius, for the tertiary thruster only.  Do you mean that it was supposed to do that?  If so then why?

maybe something got changed along the way, as radius was suposed to be sent to radius, but angle was suposed to be a function of radius, this ment the bitmap would rotate semi-randomly as the thruster's radius changed small amounts, smaller radius would have smaller rotations applyed, this was because radius was a function of thrust, so the more thrust, the more chaotic the engine glow was suposed to look.

[Tolwyn]

oh what has happened to my poor beautiful thruster effects

My thoughts exactly

[taylor]

maybe something got changed along the way, as radius was suposed to be sent to radius, but angle was suposed to be a function of radius, this ment the bitmap would rotate semi-randomly as the thruster's radius changed small amounts, smaller radius would have smaller rotations applyed, this was because radius was a function of thrust, so the more thrust, the more chaotic the engine glow was suposed to look.

I didn't change what any value was, just fixed it so everything got passed correctly.  You broke that part of it when you added the geometry batcher.  Right now the call works like you originally set it up, before the geometry batcher.  So if it's wrong now then you coded it that way to begin with. 

The tertiary radius is computed differently than either the primary or secondary thrusters (you used "magatude*4" instead of "w*0.5f"), but you coded it that way so I didn't touch it.  If you want to change the radius computation to be more appropriate then go for it.

[Col. Fishguts]

So uhm, I was just looking through the TBP ships table. We use ship specific thruster glows on various occasions, but only set the "$Thruster Bitmap" without any "$Thruster0X Radius factor", so they all get scaled accordingly to the radius factor in the POF.

But as Wanderer noted, tertiary glows don't seem to get scaled the same way as the primary and secondary ones (but they used to be scaled the same way). I guess this is a code issue that was overlooked in the recent fixage. Could that be corrected ? Otherwise we'll have to go through the whole ship table again, introducing "$Thruster03 Radius factor"s for all ships.