[Darius]

A bit of a conundrum that's been puzzling me for a while.

Is there any other way in which a ship's engine thruster glows can get either invisible or disabled without the use of sexp's? There's nothing wrong with the model as far as I can tell, the engine glows show up fine in other missions, plus changing the ship to another model gives the same lack of thrusters.

Nothing in events which can explain this, though I can't remember if the glows have always been missing or if it's a recent thing.

Using fred2_open_3_6_10_INF, which I had switched to from fred2_open_3_6_9 (which the mission was initially created in).

[Ole]

Hm, seeing that this is a related question, I'm going to throw in a - I fear - stupid question: how do I make the engine glow disappear in the first place? I just can't figure out which SEXP to use.

[karajorma]

Use the sabotage-subsystem or set-subsystem-strength SEXPs.

A bit of a conundrum that's been puzzling me for a while.

Is there any other way in which a ship's engine thruster glows can get either invisible or disabled without the use of sexp's? There's nothing wrong with the model as far as I can tell, the engine glows show up fine in other missions, plus changing the ship to another model gives the same lack of thrusters.

Nothing in events which can explain this, though I can't remember if the glows have always been missing or if it's a recent thing.

Using fred2_open_3_6_10_INF, which I had switched to from fred2_open_3_6_9 (which the mission was initially created in).

Is the engine subsystem actually damaged? It could be a setting in the initial status options of the Ships editor that's responsible. Although I wouldn't expect that to survive changing classes.

[nubbles526]

Perhaps a partially corrupt POF file? (Don't know if that exists) A POF file which has missing data for the engine glow?

What ship is it?

[Darius]

Nah, everything checks out in the initial status. The funny thing was, I placed a new model (so that it had a new model # in FRED), deleted the old one, and renamed the new into the old. Came up with missing glows again, which leads me to believe that something in the file is tagged to the name.

It's Steve-O's frigate, and it's fine otherwise in every other mission I put it in.

Aha! Just pinned it down. Ships that arrive later into the mission (ie. those who aren't there intially at the start of the mission) lose their engine glows. With and without warp effect. This also applies to fighters and small craft as well. Interestingly enough, it only seems to apply to that particular mission.

[Wanderer]

It happens only with that build? And only with ships that were not originally in the mission?

[Darius]

Ok, turns out it's not a FRED problem, but seems to be an issue with the 3.6.10 INF build I'm using. Also happens to other missions now, not just the mission I was working on. Engine glows are fine in the 28/10 build.

Might post in the 3.6.10 INF thread if there's no mention of this issue already.

[taylor]

There is a known code issue with my builds relating to thruster glows.  That should be fixed in the next available build though.

[Galemp]

There's something else that should disable thruster glows: the play-dead AI order. It will also turn off rotating submodels, deactivate turrets and I believe turn off glowmaps too.

[Darius]

Nah, play-dead doesn't do anything to the engine glows...but it does everything else that you described.

Thanks for confirming that taylor. I'm using the 10/28 INF build karajorma posted, are your builds related to his by any chance? Either way I can wait till the next available one comes out.

[karajorma]

Taylor's XT builds have a lot of experimental code in them which hasn't yet reached CVS/SVN so they can give very different results to anything I post.