[shagrath]

as it seems im ignored about that request at the BSG forum i decided to ask myself:
could you implement maneuvering thrusters? they dont need to work together with the physics, they are just there to be seen. like "fuel lacks out of my ship if its hit" it now would be "steam comes out of the left side of my ships nose for a second if im moving to the right".

for better understanding:
http://www.game-warden.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=1421

k the question shouldnt be "could you?" cause my codingknowledge is good enough to know that it can be done. i have to ask "would you?"

[Prophet]

At some point there was some work to create something like that for TBP. I can't remember who did it no matter how hard I try.

Anyway. The idea was that the game would change the size of thruster glows scattered around Starfurys wingtips according to wich direction the ship was moving. There was even a model of Starfury with all the thursters, but I think the code itself never escaped the coders computer...

Good question is: Who was that guy who was working on it?
A better question is: How far did he get?
And the mother of all question is: Why in hell the code is not already working!

[Bobboau]

it was me, it worked fine as far as I know, goober scraped it for some reason.

[WMCoolmon]

Whatever happened to engines switching off when they got blown up, too?

[Goober5000]

Originally posted by Bobboau
it was me, it worked fine as far as I know, goober scraped it for some reason.

When?

Originally posted by WMCoolmon
Whatever happened to engines switching off when they got blown up, too?

I thought taylor fixed that.  Maybe not in CVS yet.

[WMCoolmon]

I'm pretty sure it was in CVS, but now it isn't. I have a screenie of it...although I suppose I could've just been using one of taylor's builds.

[taylor]

Originally posted by WMCoolmon
I'm pretty sure it was in CVS, but now it isn't. I have a screenie of it...although I suppose I could've just been using one of taylor's builds.

It's all in CVS but Goober made a change which broke it for some models.  I changed the models in my set of VPs to make it work right and then forgot about it.

Goober's change in question was to figuring the subsystem name, matching something, I don't remember off the top of my head right now.  Basically Goober's change was right but some models had engine subsystem names in the model which differed from the tables.  The Deimos for instance has engine01a in one and engine01 in the other.  Goober's change correctly marks these as different so my code never can figure out if the engine is disabled or not.  So the bug is a discrepancy between the model and the table entry rather than a code issue, though I suppose and extra check code be added to fix the current problem models.  A better idea is just to fix the models or the tables though.

For the other models, which specify one set of thrusters and span them over multiple engines, I never got that working to my satisfaction.  It only is a problem with a handful of the Volition models that I know of but all of my attempts at a fix would only work properly on a few models so I scrapped it.  Now, if it only has one thruster bank, it will skip the engine subsystem specific disable check.  This was done last month I think since the thruster bank would be assigned to one engine subsystem and if there was more than one engine then taking out that one engine would skip rendering for them all.

[Omniscaper]

Originally posted by shagrath
as it seems im ignored about that request at the BSG forum ....

Not ignored, just overlooked since I've made such a feature request months ago.

Isn't there a way to simply enable or disable textures when a ship moves a particular way? I was thinking about an overly complex set of SEXP's to control textures of simple thruster flare shapes.

[WMCoolmon]

It should be even easier than that. Just turn on/off the thrusters when the user presses a particular button.

My idea was to have flags for each thruster, each keypress would generate one flag, whenever that flag was present the thruster would activate. That way you could have any thruster respond to up to 32 different keypresses. It'd also be good for realisticness since the same thrusters might be used to roll left or right as used to slide up or down. (This would take roughly 4 additional bytes in the model file per thruster. )

I don't have any idea how it was implemented.

[shagrath]

Originally posted by Omniscaper


Not ignored, just overlooked since I've made such a feature request months ago.
 

so i have to apology for getting a little bit mad bout that.
anyway, some kind of answer would have been nice.

im just looking forward to that mod and dont want it to be something half-baked like so many other mods. the bsg tos mod for freespace for example... a viper model, a raider model, the battlestar and a mission, thats all what it has to offer... so much potential.

[Goober5000]

Originally posted by taylor
Goober's change in question was to figuring the subsystem name, matching something, I don't remember off the top of my head right now.  Basically Goober's change was right but some models had engine subsystem names in the model which differed from the tables.  The Deimos for instance has engine01a in one and engine01 in the other.  Goober's change correctly marks these as different so my code never can figure out if the engine is disabled or not.

Sounds like subsystem_stricmp.  It was originally put in place to handle inconsistent "s"es, as in engine/engines and communication/communications.  It wouldn't be hard to add another check for "a"s so that engine01/engine01a would be recognized.  Should we do that?

[Prophet]

Originally posted by Goober5000
Should we do that?

You kidding?
Do it!

[taylor]

Originally posted by Goober5000
Sounds like subsystem_stricmp.  It was originally put in place to handle inconsistent "s"es, as in engine/engines and communication/communications.  It wouldn't be hard to add another check for "a"s so that engine01/engine01a would be recognized.  Should we do that?

Up to you.  I don't even like the "s" fix since it's basically just a hack for laziness sake.  The "s" fixes Volition models though so leaving that is ok but I can't say that I'm thrilled about supporting it further with "a".  I'm not really one to complain about such a thing though.  I do think it would be easier/better to just fix the table entries in the MediaVPs to match the model and be done with it.

[Goober5000]

Originally posted by taylor
Up to you.  I don't even like the "s" fix since it's basically just a hack for laziness sake.  The "s" fixes Volition models though so leaving that is ok but I can't say that I'm thrilled about supporting it further with "a".  I'm not really one to complain about such a thing though.  I do think it would be easier/better to just fix the table entries in the MediaVPs to match the model and be done with it.

Well there are a few things to consider here.  First, is the "a" inconsistency present with the Volition tables, not just the mediaVPs?  If so, we should add the extra check.

Secondly, the "s" check is helpful even if the tables are all correct.  Suppose I have a mission where I have to sabotage the player's comms at some point after he starts the mission (as happened in ST:R).  Unless it's a scramble mission, I have no way of knowing whether the player will choose a fighter with "communications" or one with "communication".  The sexp needs to handle both cases.  If there's a chance we might have the same problem with engine01/engine01a, we'll need the same check.

[taylor]

Originally posted by Goober5000
Well there are a few things to consider here.  First, is the "a" inconsistency present with the Volition tables, not just the mediaVPs?  If so, we should add the extra check.

Not that I am aware.  I've only seen it with the hi-poly models.  I know for sure that it doesn't affect the original Deimos model.

I do see the point of the "s" check so even though I don't like it, I don't have a problem with it being there.  I can see a problem with "a" if someone used both engine01 and engine01a in a model.  That is a deffinite possibility and you certainly wouldn't want those two different subsystems seen as being the same.

[Goober5000]

Originally posted by taylor
Not that I am aware.  I've only seen it with the hi-poly models.  I know for sure that it doesn't affect the original Deimos model.

Okay.  That's enough for me to refrain from adding it unless the issue pops up again.

I do see the point of the "s" check so even though I don't like it, I don't have a problem with it being there.  I can see a problem with "a" if someone used both engine01 and engine01a in a model.  That is a definite possibility and you certainly wouldn't want those two different subsystems seen as being the same.

True.  That's my only major misgiving about it.

[WMCoolmon]

Well, if it's just stuff in the mediaVP tables, don't bother with the -a thing...that can be fixed, just needs someone to go through the high-poly models and double check everything.