[Bobboau]

damned blinking code, it took me five minutes to rewrite it, and five hours to figure I forgot the damn "if (bank->is_on)" before the rendering code

**beats head for being such a moron**

anyway

1) no problem

2) sound like a good idea

[DTP]

regarding blinking lights, are there any chance that we can put some values into the Glow sections, such as

Delay; how long before this light triggers

delay because, that would make an easy way to make running lights. They would however run all the time.

i dont know about all of you, but i think its plain stupid to have lights going on and off, in the middle of a battle.

In a nebula, that would double. ("like here i am, shoot me")

so maybe a new SEXP is needed here like

when (missiontime)
do (AI_DONT_BLINK)
data ("SHIP")
data ("SHIP2)
data ("wing")
data("wing2").

and a vice verca SEXP like AI_BLINK_AGAIN.

but neither should be bound to AI orders since you cant order player ships anything.

and and and, sorry

well, but could you make sure those lights dont blink or give light when the ship is playing dead, like the addition i made, and will upload soon to CVS like rotating sections not to rotate when playing dead.

btw made the knossos device accept play_dead order so you can have the effect of turning it off and on.

the playing death thing should be easy to implement.

[Bobboau]

that is how it is being done, basicly,
the test models I made wern't very good implementations (well the Ulysses was fairly good) the glows shouldn't be nearly as big as they were

[Bobboau]

OK uploading a new vertion, the glows blink one second on 1/2 seconds off, default testing values, these will be things loaded from the POF soon,
big reason for the upload I have implemented the busted up ship flicker code, when a ship is damaged and the electrical arcs are spurting the glows flicker, very cool looking, sort of hard to see though with how much blinking is going on though

[Nico]

that sounds really great
mmh, can't really go through all the thread for now, so what are the drawbacks ( I mean what still won't work, or will something crash )?

[LtNarol]

any chance for sequenced blinking lights? so that we can make the orion runway light up they way they have it in the cutscenes?

[Kazan]

do the lights actually cast light into the scene?

ie if your righter goes past a green light on a carrier it casts a green glow on you

[Bobboau]

I havn't made the dynamic lighting yet, but I guess we should get the POF specs redy for it

int pos
int rad
vect rgb
int intensity

for each bank
I'll have to make some sort of light culling code, cause this will be a monster procesor hit with that many lights

[ZylonBane]

I hope the lights aren't dynamic. Having, say, every single light in a runway strip calculated as a dynamic light source would murder the frame rate. Plus there would be the complication of making sure a light didn't cast onto the ship it was attached to. FS2's lighting model just isn't good enough for this to look right. Anyway, running lights in real life aren't supposed to illuminate anything besides themselves. They're really not that bright.

Regarding the issues with turning the lights on and off, how hard would it be to add an untargetable "Lights" subsystem?

[Kazan]

forget the dynamic lights, zylon is right, too much of a hit

[and yes they would hit the ship casting them[

[Bobboau]

well I would only think a handfull of them would be, anyway I don't realy want this myself

[Bobboau]

ok seeing as we have that other thread to discus glow points, can we discus fighter beams again

[Kazan]

aye

[Bobboau]

OK boys and girls I am now going to try and get beam sheild hit code working

I must like pain

[Bobboau]

hey I got it too work, cool
I have to do a bit more work and I'll post an update, bunch of debugging code I have to coment out and have to figure why it isn't rendering sheild hits

[Bobboau]

just updated it, sheild hit code... sort of works

some times it flairs up some times it doesn't
it always hit's the sheild and drains the right quadrint
I stoped the beam wack for beam-sheild colisions, becase I wanted too

[r0nin]

Hmmmm.  Is there anywhere that you can upload your changed code files?  I'm assuming that we are talking about several files and a lot of code that had to be modified, so it might be easier to just download your actual cpp files from somewhere and look at them than to ask you to post the code you added/changed.

Either way, I'm really curious how you finally worked the beams out and how you got the beams to strike shields in the right place.

[Sesquipedalian]

Cool!

By the way, Bobbaou, have you gotten the fighter beams to drain weapons energy yet?

[Bobboau]

I've had them draining energy for quite some time now, and in this version I think the energy draining is the best it drains energy per second, as oposed to energy per frame as my earlier code did
the only major thing I'd like to change in the code is how it handles sound effects

[Sesquipedalian]

Oh good.  I must have missed that bit of news somewhere along the way.