Bridge Commander Universe

NinjaDriver · Lieutenant Joined: 03 Apr 2002 Posts: 431

The transparent textures are similar to the animated textures in that you can't apply them to more than one object, if you do, then none of them will be transparent. All transparent meshes need to be attached into the same object in order to work.

Chronocidal_Guy · **Posted**: 10-10-2002 06:20 AM

K, quick question.. Once you set up the .ifl file, you can manually change the names to include the _glow extension, and the file still appears to work in Max...it works when you animate the scene anyway. Will this transfer to BC without any flaws? Or does BC even use the .ifl file for anything?

Guest · **Posted**: 10-10-2002 02:06 PM

No, The ifl is not exported. the name of the files is embedded into the .nif file.

So if you use nif textures, the exporter will create new names for then, and the glow won't work.
if you use tga maps, the glow wil appear, but it's effect on the animation is a bit unpredictable.

Cpt

Chronocidal_Guy · **Posted**: 10-28-2002 03:02 AM

Hmm... while looking at the ship scripts (not hardpoints) I had an idea... don't know if it will work, or just screw up the program, so I want to ask if anyone else has tried this... The ship script specifies the texture suffices for glows and specular textures.. so, if you change the glow suffix, say to something like "_apple," will the program still know to look for glows in that texture, as long as you rename the texture to "yourtexture_apple.tga?"

Now, going along those lines... will BC allow you to list more than one suffix for a texture? This is the part I'm almost sure won't work, since I imagine the way the scripts are read by BC is pretty much hardwired, but I want to explore every possibility. What if you could tell BC to look for the glow textures under several different names? So if you had a few copies of the textures, with different extensions, it would be able to call up whichever one was being used at any given time? So say you tell the script to look for the extensions "_glow1," "_glow2," "_glow3," etc... that way you could change the extension of your glow textures to work with animations, without losing the glow.

I admit, I'm probably crazy for even asking this, and I know it's a long shot, but I've had little success getting animations to work at all when the textures are supposed to glow. Specifically, I'm trying to make animated plasma effects for the bussards on the Sovereign, and I'm hoping to do it without having to add a second transparent layer over the bussards with the glow, since I've had way too many pains with the model already.

R2Destroyer · Cadet 3rd Class Joined: 27 Aug 2002 Posts: 47

cool?

Chronocidal_Guy · **Posted**: 12-05-2002 11:44 PM

Note, this is going off the assumption that no one has actually noticed this yet, because I never really saw it discussed before.

Ok, as we know, it's not possible to illuminate any map if you want to animate it. The obvious reason for this was that you cannot add the _glow suffix to any animated texture name, and still have it work. But while fooling around with the ship scripts today, I've come to the conclusion that the game simply can't do both at once, regardless of the texture names.

Anyone who'e examined the actual ship scripts (not the hardpoints) knows that they specify the texture suffices that determine which textures are specular maps, which textures glow, etc. Well, I deleted the "_glow" search string today just as a test. The end result was that ALL textures glowed, no matter if they had a _glow suffix or not, including the animated texture. However, the animation was frozen on the first frame. So being able to illuminate textures that are animated may not be just a file naming problem but something in the game engine itself.

I don't know if that helps anyone at all, or even is a worthwhile thing to think about, but I wondered if this was already known, or if anyone could think of some way to use this little piece of info to help work out a way to make animated and illuminated maps.

The thing I'd like to try and fix is that if you have low light sources, animated maps don't show up. Even if you do have an illuminated layer over the animation, it doesn't cast any light onto the animated part, so any animation you see is dependent on the local light sources. So the animation doesn't even appear in the "Void" map that came with System Pack 10. There are no light sources, so there is no light on the animated map, and it doesn't show up.

There is one thing I have left to try, but it's a longshot. The animated bussards on my ship, for some reason, DO work, even though the two engines are separate objects. I can't explain that. When I delete the glow suffix, they freeze up though. I'm going to try joining the engines into one object, and just see what happens, but I doubt it will do anything, considering the animation worked already, even when the engines were separate. I was under the impression that it wasn't possible to apply an animated map to more than one object, but I guess we were wrong.. or maybe it's because the two engines are cloned objects.. I dunno... anyone have any ideas?

Guest · **Posted**: 12-06-2002 01:03 AM

Hawkeye,

You got the point. This isn't because only of the glow suffix... this is because for glowing animated maps you mainly need to animate the RGB output and the alpha channels.. and the game doesn't seem to be able to animate the alphas... even if you export the maps like tga's with the _glow end (manually writing the ifl file)... the only thing you can get is the hole thing glowing, and in mostly cases, the animation stucks.
i got that trouble when trying to make the excalibur warp nacelles to glow.... but then you say "well.. the excalibur nacelles glow.. how?"
the answer is that ain't the blue plasma what glows... the small sticks over it glow... i created a mate object with transparence and made the opaque part of it to glow.. and then put this "mask" over the animated object, which actually don't glow. If you combine the right mask and animation, you won't be able to see much difference on it.

Cpt.

Chronocidal_Guy · **Posted**: 12-06-2002 01:43 AM

If by "mask" you mean an extra layer over the animation, yep, that's what I've done, and it does work well under most conditions. The glow and animation combine really well in most of the maps in quickbattle.. the problem comes when you don't have any other light sources, like for really dark, starless areas. Then, all you see is the layer over the animation glowing, and the animation disappears. Unfortunately, glows can't cast any light on other objects. So if you use a ship with animated maps on something like the "Void" area from BanzaiZap's system pack, you won't see any animation at all, just the glowing layers over the animation.

The only other thing I can think of is if you could somehow place light sources within the actual ship model, but I imagine that would either not work at all, or would kill most computer systems from the light calculations. :tongue

Guest · **Posted**: 12-06-2002 01:47 AM

Anduril · Lieutenant Commander Joined: 20 Feb 2002 Posts: 531

Actually what I did to counteract that was put the glows on the bussards and then put shells over the bussards that had the animation and transparency applied to them.

That way even in the dark the bussards glow but you can see the darker vanes rotating.

I still am not sure how I did it since I resorted to cutting them off the previous version for use on the latest.

Chronocidal_Guy · **Posted**: 12-06-2002 04:44 AM

Hmm.. so you mean you can use transparency with animation, but not illumination? I'll have to try switching the maps to see what happens... Might work better, since the bussards use one alpha for both illumination and transparency, and they aren't very bright. Thanx Smile