[Galemp]

I've made some slight adjustments to the icons. linky I fixed it!

The big ships are bigger, the small ships are smaller, and they all have a slight transparency in the fill so you can see what's behind them a bit better.

Wanderer, this only works with DDS files formatted as you specified. Anything else--even TGAs--causes a crash on load. 'Twould be nice if they had a little more support for other formats, maybe even EFFs.

[Wanderer]

Well.. i think i have sorted out the scaling thing by bumping the bottom and right clipping borders. It gives a scaling option so that you define the max of the images larger dimension and game then scales the image as needed.

As for controlling it via alpha blending.. that is difficult given certain blips have alpha 255 by default while iff blips have alpha of 240 or 176 depending if they are close up (or targeted in standard mode) or further away.

I also got the 3d radar images to work.. in a way.. problem is that i have yet to figure how to make the game use the 2D drawing color for the 3d objects (like the blip images) of the radar... which is not really made much simpler by the fact the game uses 'cheatish' method for drawing the spheres. Any ideas would be welcome...

As for the image file type problem... i'll take a look - though i wont promise anything..

[Galemp]

Hm. Perhaps for the 3D radar (since it is 3D) you could render the lowest LOD of the ship being represented? There's code for the target view that will let you render it in wireframe using the IFF color.

If the artists have done their job properly it should only be an extra 20 polies for each ship in the mission, without texture mapping having to be rendered, and it would translate orientation as well as position. Again, your problem is with scaling, but perhaps you can scale them to a uniform value based on the model's radius then multiplying it by 0.5 or 1.5 for extra-small and extra-large ships.

This is all conjecture, though. I don't know if it's possible or even how it will look.

[Wanderer]

That  wireframe was marvelous idea.. got to take a look at it immediately. 

Hmm... it seems to use solid color filled lines.. so it wasnt that useful...

[Galemp]

What would you want it to use?

[Cobra]

It would be nice if I could play with this build, but I'm getting bull**** errors such as:

Warning: EFF: No frame images were found.  EFF, SbeamAglow.eff, is invalid.

File: bmpman.cpp
Line: 1799


Call stack:
------------------------------------------------------------------
    fs2_open_3_6_9d_radar.exe 00b2d025()
    fs2_open_3_6_9d_radar.exe 008d9e2d()
    fs2_open_3_6_9d_radar.exe 008e2660()
    fs2_open_3_6_9d_radar.exe 0072dd92()
    fs2_open_3_6_9d_radar.exe 0071994f()
    fs2_open_3_6_9d_radar.exe 00719a81()
    fs2_open_3_6_9d_radar.exe 00719c36()
    fs2_open_3_6_9d_radar.exe 0072707e()
    fs2_open_3_6_9d_radar.exe 0091764e()
    fs2_open_3_6_9d_radar.exe 00725b92()
    fs2_open_3_6_9d_radar.exe 00917cac()
    fs2_open_3_6_9d_radar.exe 0072929c()
    fs2_open_3_6_9d_radar.exe 0072952e()
    fs2_open_3_6_9d_radar.exe 00c54e66()
    fs2_open_3_6_9d_radar.exe 00c54cef()
------------------------------------------------------------------

...and endless errors about the GVF Serapis having a null moment of inertia and BFRed having more than 5 beam sections.

[Wanderer]

Those errors have absolutely nothing to do with the build or with the features that are shown here. Those are well known issues in the 3.6.10 beta mediavps. All builds (debug builds) should either report those errors / warnings (either as popups or just to the log file) or then you will encounter some odd behavior.

What would you want it to use?

Well i would like it to use the same bitmap image as the 2D radar does.. And it does that. Problem is that i haven't yet figured out how i should approach issue short of building whole new set of functions for it but then again i have still lot of things to try before that. And the issue was that the image is drawn as grey bitmap..

[Cobra]

I was about to ask why Galemp posted a debug build.

[Wanderer]

What else? Using release build only sweeps the problems under the carper (so to speak). The beamglow is still missing and the firing of BFred could still CTD the game not to mention the other problems.

Besides - unless some else used the patches and compiled a release build - the only build available is the debug build i compiled.

[Backslash]

Removed until I can figure out where the DDS corruption is coming from.

What corruption is this?
Guessing here, but I wonder if the DXT compression plays havoc with such small art.  You might experiment with u555 or u888.  u1555 or u8888 if you need alpha.  All are lossless.

Hey Cobra, does checking "Disable parse errors" on the Troubleshoot tab help?

[Cobra]

I actually did try that. I still kept getting errors.

[Wanderer]

Yeah.. too small compressed DDS files will suffer from corruption, IIRC limit is 16x16 though i could be a tad wrong about that.

As for how you can fix the errors.. Use older mediavp set. There is a reason why the current release is tagged as beta

[Cobra]

Oh shush, I know.

[Wanderer]

Here is something that is probably buggy but might just work out nicely... There is a slight clipping issue with upper edge of the 3d radar though which should be something that can most likely be fixed... radar_mk2.7z. It has scaling for images enabled - more or less.

[Backslash]

Nice.  I work more than usual today so I can't try it out, but the skimming of the code I did made sense.

I wonder... this might be a big project, but is there any chance you could apply somewhat the same technique (only the opposite ) involving the grayscale images, to add an option for HUD ANIs to allow NON-grayscale?  Does that make sense?  Currently as you probably know, hud gauges are made in 16 color grayscale (a very particular palette too), and the game applies its own shading and coloring.  The ability to turn some of that off for certain gauges and display a full-color ANI (or EFF set someday ) would be incredibly useful.  WCSaga in particular would like it.  If you're interested in trying this, I'll gladly help if I can.

[Galemp]

The good news is, my new icons work wonderfully. The bad news is, I'm still getting the wing assert crash during missions, specifically Their Finest Hour. I'd focus on fixing that.

[Wanderer]

Hmm.. Yeah i get it too... Happens when 'Scorpio' wing loses all but the last ship (which is usually Scorpio 1)... I'll try to take a look at that.

EDIT: Well.. It ain't any of my doings - that is i get the same problem with unmodified SVN build. And it certainly is triggered when there is only a single member or the Scorpio flight remaining though this does not need to be Scorpio 1.

[Backslash]

Hmm... the bombers and fighters icons are garbled for me... but that could be because they're smaller than 16.  Padded it to 16 and it works, easily fixed.

Odd crash.  Something to do with ai_maybe_add_form_goal.  Somehow the remaining ship is not part of a wing or something.  Wish I was better at understanding the debugger...

[Wanderer]

It may have something to do with the fact that the waves of the Scorpio wing arrive at that time as well. So there are then essentially 5 Scorpio ships belonging to wing of four ships...

EDIT... Do you mean the fighter and bomber icon images were garbled when they were set via the table option to have size of 16 (or smaller) or when the actual images were smaller than 16x16?

[karajorma]

Odd crash.  Something to do with ai_maybe_add_form_goal.  Somehow the remaining ship is not part of a wing or something.  Wish I was better at understanding the debugger...

The problem arises because Scorpio wing has a Threshold value (i.e not all of the ships have to be destroyed before the next wave appears). I can already reproduce the problem in a test mission and thanks to Wanderer I know where the bug was introduced. All I need to do now is figure out how to fix it.