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I had an idea about how to have paint jobs that just paint parts of your ship rather than the whole thing. Don't know if this works but: Separate your ship sprites into two parts - one the paintable area the other the rest (the paintable area should be greyscale, not coloured). Have the paintable as the base sprite and the rest as the alt. With any luck paint outfits will only paint the base.
You could test that on a Thunderforge. It uses an animated "Alt" sprite for the rotating crew section. I tried it, though, and it didn't work that way.
Nuts. What if you used running lights for the rest of the ship? At max intensity do they still have any transparency?
First of all, running light blink on and off. Second, they are an extra graphics option. People on slow hardware would not be able to use a ship made out of running lights (though that is a very cool idea)
Running lights could be set such that they didnt blink. And people who turn off graphics options miss pretty stuff. Thats the point.
I vote it would work, paint those bits of the ship black, then at full running light intensity, the overlay would look perfectly normal.
I cant recall, but i believe there is a flag in the shan that keeps running lights from turning off when disabled, because that would look weird. Running lights also have something like twice the visibility in murk. So theres that to consider, but otherwise itd work fine.
I had a thought. Maybe you could set a planet's weapon type to a fighter bay. You could also get one to self-destruct by giving the planet a planet-type grenade weapon with a proxy setting of 1 or higher. Would those work?
Planet's can indeed destroy themselves. Why you would want to do such a thing escapes me, though. Since you're thinking about it, you probably have something in mind.
The planet-side fighterbays, however, do not work. Sorry.
This post has been edited by Eugene Chin : 19 January 2006 - 07:19 PM
Obviously he's making a scenario where the main characters are planets, and they have personalities and suchlike. Planets love, planets fight, and every once in a while a love-sick weakling of a planet commits suicide.
One more thought. I recently had the idea of making a guided missile point-defence system. It would be a regular PD turret that fires normal unguided projectiles which instantly submunition into guided missiles. An even cooler thing would be if it submunitioned into multiple missiles. This might very well work, and I'll test it tomorrow.
Seeker Weapons only home in on ships, not enemy fire.
That would have been cool though. It reminds me of one time when; Gah, nevermind.
Been trying to get this effect since EV:O but never could...
1: A weapon that explodes so violently it instantly slams its target halfway across the system
2: A black hole weapon that tractors in anything near it.
3: Repulsor beam of such intensity that it also instantly slams a target halfway across the system.
Shrout, I imagine that a ship's own maximum speed would have something to do with these not working.
Say you have a ship with a speed of 150. No matter how many shock-bombs you throw at it, it's wreckage will never be moving away from you at a speed greater than 150.
Eugene Chin, on Jan 26 2006, 02:17 PM, said:
Say you have a ship with a speed of 150. No matter how many shock-bombs you throw at it, it's wreckage will never be moving away from you at a speed greater than 150. View Post
Interesting... So no matter the mass of the vessel or any of its other characteristics, it can never travel faster than its max speed? Verrrry different from the Ares engine - course, I guess that it should be
Shrout1, on Jan 26 2006, 10:50 AM, said:
Interesting... So no matter the mass of the vessel or any of its other characteristics, it can never travel faster than its max speed?View Post
Except, I believe, for AI ships affected by gravitating planets. I don't have any numbers, but I've noticed that when you have a planet with very strong gravity, AI ships will zoom towards it much, much faster than an identical player ship can go.
Edwards
Of course, you could always set the max speed to 32767 - this idea has been considered before for more realistic flying, and I believe an EVO plug-in did it.
I still think the MaxSpeed field is silly, but oh well. Honestly, though, I'd rather have the engine use the Length field for something useful than set a cap on how much something can accelerate in a vacuum.
Edwards, on Jan 26 2006, 11:21 PM, said:
Shrout1, on Jan 26 2006, 02:50 PM, said:
Interesting... So no matter the mass of the vessel or any of its other characteristics, it can never travel faster than its max speed? Verrrry different from the Ares engine - course, I guess that it should be View Post
Edwards View Post
And also except, I believe, for AI ships escorting the player in formation. Leviathans as fast as a Nil'kimas Manta on afterburner, oh my!
orcaloverbri9, on Jan 27 2006, 08:09 AM, said:
Of course, you could always set the max speed to 32767 - this idea has been considered before for more realistic flying, and I believe an EVO plug-in did it. View Post
I tried this back in EVO, anyway - it tended to crash the engine when ships entered from hyperspace.
@qaanol, on Jan 27 2006, 01:16 PM, said in Cool Nova Hacks:
Actually, you leave the escorts behind when you use an afterburner. But you don't leave slow escorts behind if you have a fast ship, so you can indeed have nilk manta Leviathins.
Here's a way to be able to store items in your cargo bay for later use. Particularly usefull for extra ammo to be stored in bulk on your ship, but that you don't have immediate access to in a battle.
Could also be used to represent items of differing repair status.
Missiles in storage
I just made a weapon with invisible shots. Just give it a negative falloff value. (I used negative 10, not sure if varying values has any effect.)
Cloaking missiles anyone? :laugh: