[Col. Fishguts]

Well, these thrusters here http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Ships.tbl#.24Thruster: are quite neat and I'm putting them on our Starfuries, but I have a few questions.

1) Is it normal behavior that they only show up on the player ship ? I'd like to see them on all ships of the same class, or was that disabled for performance reasons ?

2) There seems to be a bug with reverse thrusters. When a fighter which has them dies and starts its death-roll, the reverse thrusters fire with their length stretched to infinity.
And since we're on the topic of the reverse thruster...

3) While the roll/bank thrusters spring on instantaneously when used, the reverse thrusters seem to be scaled with the reverse speed. This looks rather strange, since I'd expect them to spring to full throttle when pushing 'y', besides they look very ugly when the ship is going backwards very slowly and the thruster bitmap is squeezed to a tiny strop. I think they would look much better, if they behaved like the other thrusters.

That's all for the moment, thank you.

[Einstine909]

on this same topic, i cant get mine to work...
can some one post part of the table that went with a thruster, ill change the normals and position...

i havent posted in a while

[Wanderer]

On my test (with 369 build) the maneuvering thrusters appear on all the ships.

I couldnt actually see anything from 'reverse' thrusters.

And all the thrusters are scaled (tighter turn makes longer 'flames').

[Col. Fishguts]

Yes, I'm using the official 3.6.9 build.

Maybe the AI doesn't use 'bank', because I set the thrusters to bank left/right respectively.

I would post screenshots for illustrations, but for some obscure reason 3.6.9 produces completely black screenshots

[Bobboau]

why are these in the table?

[Col. Fishguts]

why are these in the table?

Ask the coder who implemented them (WMC if memory serves right).

[IPAndrews]

why are these in the table?

For the same reason engine glows are in the table dummy . Oh wait...

[Wanderer]

why are these in the table?

Why shouldnt they be? Model files are much more problematic to edit than table files.

Perhaps some sort of new models.tbl would be better than either of ships.tbl or pof file though.

[karajorma]

why are these in the table?

Who's going to write the program to put them in the model?

[Backslash]

I know how to change the code to fix problem 2 and 3, but it involves using the values pi->forward_thrust, pi->side_thrust, and pi->vert_thrust, and I'm not sure those are used with the AI ships.  Anyone else know?

[Bobboau]

why are these in the table?

Who's going to write the program to put them in the model?

why would you need to, I don't think there's anything that can't be put into the current thruster structure.
I supose the sound stuf you'd need to put in the table, but position normal radius length type and texture could easily be put in the current thruster (texture and type would have to go in the properties section, and that might mean a slight alteration to PCS, but thats such a minor thing I could do it in fivr minutes if I had PCS in a compileable state, it isn't even a codeing issue.)

[WMCoolmon]

I'm pretty sure that those values aren't. I remember one of the other coders (Backslash?) bringing those variables up and initially I was optimistic; but then realized that they were simply read from the control_info (ci) struct.

Under the "+Used For:" variables, there should be a "+Flags:" variable. You can use ("no scale") to make the thruster appear the same size regardless of the actual amount of thrust.

As for adding support in POFs, I just don't think it's worth it to do it. First I'd have to learn the POF format more. Then I'd have to set the code up from SourceForge, and get it to actually compile. Then I'd have to understand it well enough to add support. And finally, I'd have to provide support for it, because Kazan has yet to release PCS2 and has stopped supporting PCS. I don't need or want to get involved in that web. I don't even have a guarantee that it would let modders actually see where the thrusters are positioned.

[Col. Fishguts]

Under the "+Used For:" variables, there should be a "+Flags:" variable. You can use ("no scale") to make the thruster appear the same size regardless of the actual amount of thrust.

What's the correct syntax for the flags ?

I tried it like this:

Code: [Select]

$Thruster:
        +Used for: ( "Reverse" )
+Flags: ( "no scale" )
        +Position: (4.936 2.293 2.05)
        +Normal: (0.0 0.0 1.0)
        +Texture: manouver_thruster
        +Radius: 0.7
        +Length: 3.0
 which causes a parse error

[Wanderer]

Flags option does not work with 369 branch

[Col. Fishguts]

Ah, that would explain it then. Is there a build around with which it works ?

Also, I've found that the AI is in fact using them. But as opposed to the player ship, the thrusters on AI ships are all scaled with the amount of 'steering' in that direction, which makes them so miniscule that they're hard to spot.

The "no scale" feature sure would come in handy here.

[Wanderer]

Any recent HEAD branch builds. Though there are currently several very annoying bugs in those.

[Col. Fishguts]

Uhm, what exactly is the HEAD branch ? the current CVS ?

[karajorma]

There are two branches for the code. 3.6.9 (Which is bug fixes) and HEAD (which is new feature development + bug fixes).  You can get CVS builds from both which is why people are slowly dropping the term as an identifier of the branch and going over to actually saying HEAD CVS and 3.6.9 CVS.

[Col. Fishguts]

Ah I see. And are HEAD builds available somewhere ? Because I don't have a Win32 compiler at hand.

Also, just out of curiosity, what does HEAD stand for ?

[Trivial Psychic]

Kara, is THIS a 3.6.9 CVS or a HEAD CVS?