Why oh why?!? DX

A topic of betrayal, love, and spins.

Now for a while I've been working on my new plugin that's going to replace nova's graphics. Unfortunately, I've found that Spin resources simply don't show up on a white system background; all that shows up are planets and ships. However, when one, say, fires a blaster over a planet it shows up normally (the shot that is). After fooling around for a while, I found that the darker the system background is, the less transparent spins are.

To put it bluntly, I'm stumped. I need a white system background for my plug-in, but nothing I'll do will work (I even tried editing the starfield and trying some things which I thought were creative, but they didn't work). I need to know A. if this is a glitch with nova, will it be fixed ever? B. If there are any workarounds that I might be able to use, and C. why is it like this in the first place? My main theory is that the color of the background of the system effects the opacity of the masks of the spins, but that's just a guess.

Help? ^_^;;

Also, it might be good to say that I'm on the latest version (I think it's 1.09, right?) of windows Nova. I'm running on a Windows XP.

This post has been edited by shady tradesman : 03 January 2006 - 10:02 PM

Sounds like a glitch to me. Better report it.

I'm somewhat confused on what you're trying to do? are you trying to change the background of a nova system?

Razzle Storm, on Jan 3 2006, 09:22 PM, said:

I'm somewhat confused on what you're trying to do? are you trying to change the background of a nova system?
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Right. I want to change a system's background (for example, sol or Nerse Primus) to white and I'm having trouble with the spin-oriented graphics that show up in the system when I do so. Try it out. You'll find it doesn't work.

I reported it as a glitch to pipeline via e-mail just now.

This post has been edited by shady tradesman : 04 January 2006 - 12:25 AM

There's a little lack-luster screen shot. The ship graphics were edited by me, so don't worry about them. All ships show up on a white background because (presumably) they use shan instead of spin. You'll notice that the targeting corners are only showing up on the planet, same with my shots. Asteroids are no where to be seen either when there should be an average of 7 (I boosted it up a little to see if I wan't just missing the asteroids) on the screen at once.

Just curious, this might provide some insight; have you tried non-transparent weapons, like missiles? Hidden asteroids are quite weird, though.

This post has been edited by Weepul 884 : 04 January 2006 - 01:25 AM

Weepul 884, on Jan 4 2006, 12:20 AM, said:

Just curious, this might provide some insight; have you tried non-transparent weapons, like missiles? Hidden asteroids are quite weird, though.
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I just flipped Sol to white on 1.0.9 Mac and saw the same problems. To answer your question Weepul, missiles do seem to show up, as do Fusion Pulses until they start to fade out as shown here: http://homepage.mac....NovaWhiteBG.mov

Right. Hellhound missiles show up, so I'm guessing other non-transparent weapons do too. As for the asteroids, I got them fixed with a little tweaking. As for the targeting corners, coursor, and message bouey, I still need to work on how to fix them.

If a weapon has the "Weapon's shots are translucent" flag set, it simply won't show up. That flag basically applies the Nova engine equivalent of a 'screen' layer blend effect in Photoshop - meaning the engine looks at the colour information within the sprite area, and multiplies the inverse of the blend and base colours (at least, that's how PShop calculates it). The resulting effect is always lighter. So on a white background, you won't see the shot at all. The same function is used to run ship glows (of all varieties), explosions and target reticules.

That's why you can see missiles but not blaster bolts, for example. It's not a bug, it's a feature that was never designed to work under these parameters.

None of this accounts for the missing asteroids though - that really is a bug.

This post has been edited by Hudson : 04 January 2006 - 03:21 AM

It turns out the asteroids were something I had done.

Is there any way to make the other translucent items non-translucent?

I'm dealing with the same problems you are, shady. Making single-color shield graphics that look good coming in and out of cloak, and in murk, and in large areas, is nigh-impossible. Nova's transparency system is very confusing, and with the new nit-pickyness of 1.0.9 graphics, I have no idea what to tell you in regards to successfully modifying base sprite transparencies.

However, if you make your own ship and weapon sprites, and render them against a white background, this problem could potentially be solved.

Matt Burch's response was that this is indeed the alpha blending at work, and it's not a bug but a feature. Sorry!

Dang. that means I'll never be able to fix the targeting things!

Might as well just do a different plug-in.

Indeed. I'm really sorry about that, but it's just the way they work.