looks like my texturemapper still needs to be moderated, you know me im a "prinzipienreiter" someone who cares a lot (we care a lot ...) aboout the basic understanding of a topic, it's something this button presser generation leaks strongly of.
i found a very deep explanation to 3D view and UV mapping in "Google Books", for those who like to get deeper knowledge about this as just to fiddle around with a software which won't tell you the rules that stand behind.
however i did that in advance all myself and to create something like a texturemapper i had to know how the tard works. most i knew already but there was still some questions i couldn't have answered before i made some test models. the starting point for my texmapper was Tom "noflag" Morton's (noflag is very important to me 😉 ) "cuboid" function. I extended this function to a textured cuboid which will be textured automatically from all sides with the same texture (instead of a lousy diagonal projection which is still handy in some cases).
remember this tard is all out of my shitty brain, i have no web at home where i could have referred to something like the above link.
+---+---+ +------ / + + + +-----+ +-----+ +------ +-----+
| | / | /| / | | | | | | |
| +---- / | / | /___ +-----+ +-----+ +---- +-----+
| | / | / | / | | | |
| +------ / | | / | | +------ |
===================================================================================
THIS IS SUCH AN IMPORTANT FUNCTION THAT I DECIDED TO PUT IT IN A SEPERATE FILE
(should have done this a long time ago)
INPUT
-----
- position & size of the geometry on which the texture will be projected on
- projection = view plane - side from which you look at the geometry,
v(0,1,0) = top (bottom), v(0,0,1) = back (front), v(1,0,0) = right side (left side)
- divisor, correctional vector either to repeat a texture i.e. v(1.5,1,1) to tile it
1.5 times along "x", or to adjust the result if the size doesn't exactly fits
OUTPUT
------
a table which contains the three vectors for the texture projection
why didn't use the texture() function rightaway?
just because :)
just because it allows to store the vectors as a variable and
reuse them in the script if needed and foremost this allows manual tuning and if i
output the fished call for the texture function you can't do such.
USAGE
-----
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| local front = texmapper( position, size, v(0,0,1) ) |
| texture( 'texturepath', front[1], front[2], front[3] ) |
| |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
THEORY
------
a texture is always 1 in relation to the geometries dimensions. to calcultae the factor
to scale a geometry on any texture no matter what size or aspect it has we have to divide
1 with the dimensions of the geometry we like to project the texture on, resp. project the
mesh on the plane of view).
this wil strech a texture sometimes so much it turns out quite ugly
to keep a texture in it's aspect & size (repetive use of the texture) we must recompensate
this default behaviour by multiplying the resulting scale with the models dimension
so it turns back to the original size in relation to the texture.
the use varies, often you simply like to project atexture on a couple of geometries.
SCHEMA
------
Geometry (righthanded):
+y
|
|
| front/back
|
side 0---------- +x
/
/ top/bottom
/
+z
Texture plane (righthanded):
+V +---------+ UV max
| |
| |
| |
| |
UV min 0---------+ +U
though....
one likes to map a geometry on a texture map which contains different textures for
the model(s).
TEXTURE DIMENSIONS
------------------
if you have a special texture map or need
to project the mesh on a given section in the texture you need to precalculate
the correctiomnal values for the position of the mesh and its size in relation
to the textures dimensions.
i didn't liked to implment this function in the mapper, it's fine for 'everyday use'
it's a quite simpler explanation as to read a book, of course you won't have deep understing after my explanation but it will make you clear why certain things are as they are.
btw, it's possible to use this function also for texture maps which contain different textures for various parts/viewplanes. i wasn't sure how and if when i wrote it and wrote also a second function the "texture calculator" it didn't turned out well and thus i returned to my mapper an i experienced it's suitable also for this task.
i didn't expect that the interest will be big in this but i'm very proud of what i elaborated myself.
finally a picture which i already posted (but i unfortunately made a mistake with the labelling, at 6:00 am after a 24h session your brain starts to get very tired)
i guess the picture tells more as a thousend words you can lose about this topic.
yes, i remember one link per per post else it has to be moderated, ok.
except that i created the bunch of shuttles i did some work to the lmr functions and it gets easier step by step. finally i achieved it to make a texturing function, it's not perfect and still you need to edit the output of it especially if you like to map the geometry in a certain section of the texture (map).
but it's already cool and i should have written this a long time ago, it's a very useful function, you no longer have to fiddle around emdless until you find especially the proper scale, the positioning is somewhat rough, for a simple mapping it's ok but if you measure a texture and use the "UV" data it multiplies small errors to big ones.
to reach this i started with the cuboid function and used it to find out how it can work and how the UV projection is for a righthanded model system (remember i have no web at home, so no help from any wiki or else, this is all my personal work)
+---+---+ +------ / + + + +-----+ +-----+ +------ +-----+
| | / | /| / | | | | | | |
| +---- / | / | /___ +-----+ +-----+ +---- +-----+
| | / | / | / | | | |
| +------ / | | / | | +------ |
===================================================================================
THIS IS SUCH AN IMPORTANT FUNCTION THAT I DECIDED TO PUT IT IN A SEPERATE FILE
(should have done this a long time ago)
INPUT
-----
- position & size of the geometry on which the texture will be projected on
- projection = projection vector - side from which you look at the geometry,
v(0,1,0) = top (bottom), v(0,0,1) = back (front), v(1,0,0) = right side (left side)
- divisor, correctional vector either to repeat a texture i.e. v(1.5,1,1) to tile it
1.5 times along "x", or to adjust the result if the size doesn't exactly fits
OUTPUT
------
a table which contains the four vectors for the texture projection
example
why didn't use the texture() function rightaway?
just because :)
just because it allows to store the vectors as a variable and
reuse them in the script if needed further and this is most important you can trim the result
which is unfortunately needed if you use a texturemap divided in sections for parts/viewplanes.
USAGE
-----
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| local front = texmapper( position, size, v(0,0,1) ) |
| texture( 'texturepath', front[1], front[2], front[3] ) |
| |
| check the test model to understand how to use the functions results |
| |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
THEORY
------
a texture is always 1 in relation to the geometries dimensions. to calcultae the factor
to scale a geometry on any texture no matter what size or aspect it has we have to divide
1 with the dimensions of the geometry we like to project the texture on, resp. project the
mesh on the plane of view).
this wil strech a texture sometimes so much it turns out quite ugly
to keep a texture in it's aspect & size (repetive use of the texture) we must recompensate
this default behaviour by multiplying the resulting scale with the models dimension
so it turns back to the original size in relation to the texture.
the use varies, often you simply like to project atexture on a couple of geometries.
SCHEMA
------
Geometry (righthanded):
+y
|
|
| front/back
|
side 0---------- +x
/
/ top/bottom
/
+z
Viewplane (righthanded):
+V +---------+ UV max
| |
| |
| |
| |
UV min 0---------+ +U
though....
one likes to map a geometry on a texture map which contains different textures for
the model(s).
TEXTURE DIMENSIONS
------------------
if you have a special texture map or need
to project the mesh on a given section in the texture you need to precalculate
the correctiomnal values for the position of the mesh and its size in relation
to the textures dimensions.
i didn't liked to implment this function in the mapper, it's fine for 'everyday use'
--]]yep you can learn something here 😉
isn't that a nice textured cube?
as one can see pioneer makes a fraction of an failure when projecting a texture, you can see here a very small border from the black groundlines to the next repetion ( a reason why i made this one sided border because i noticed this slight failure before). as larger the object is and as more the texture will probably streched as larger this error will be - unfortunately.
Wonderful work here Gernot. It's nice too to see the Shuttle be much more useful for a change and the Kestrel looks really great in the colour too! 🙂
i agree the FE2 colorset fits very well but will be reserved for the FE2/FFE ships.
i've spent 2 days creating a 256 colors palette (table) - which i can't use 🙁
i can use it partwisely or as template, anyway 256 materials no one needs.
the base was the "atari 256" a very nice palette, quite natural looking with less saturated colors, i like it and even mom said "hey they look nice" (much better as the windows or mac standard 256 colors).
i needed two days to fit the colors to multiples of 8 of 256 to 1 (because we use in pioneer values from 0 to 1 for r,g,b)
the palette isn't exactly "atari256" anymore i had to fit them to multiples of 8 (wanted to because it will alter them slightly) and changed a few because i liked to have a the best possible color gradient i could reach and i guess i reached it well. like i said i can use the paltte
i elaborated for other things to (like converting pictures as wallpapers for the Amiga OS3 using a standard palette or similar tasks). it has no big use for pioneer but it was at least a good job i've made.
yes, it was the biggest fault of the factory which educated me as textiletechnician not to engage me as a colorist (they preferred to take a relative of the owner for the job, i'm still somewhat angry about that even if that is 35 years ago). "idiots!" it costed me my carrer as textiltechnician because i lost interest to work for the industry and moved to the construction site, mostly because of the salary and because they put an uneducated in a position where someone like me would belong, education and talent, i earned nearly double as an unskilled on the construction site as i earned as educated in my branch (no responsability as unskilled worker), fault no. 2 of them, from my pov. in general nepotism is something which has cost us to much in the past, wrong ppl in the wrong place, "dead wood".
something different
doesn't that looks like a stormtrooper riding a bearded giant?
happened under circumstance with a seamless texture i made of a simple piece of rock.
To me it looks like one of the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz riding a jet ski.
i like the shuttles much. you have to manage fuelconsumption and time well for distances above 300 AU, it's a task of its own. the autopilot isn't a big help even once you have earned enough to buy one you need to load extra fuel but not to much else you will be to slow. you can use the autopilot set the course to target, then you will have to accelerate manually until you used up a little more as half of the fuel you loaded totally (you need less to break because you have only about half of the mass). after you passed the "zenith" of your flight you can re engage the autopilot and let it break and finally dock. sometimes i miss the point even if i should know when to stop it can easy take 15 minutes until you reached the "zenith" (or point of no return) and sometimes i oversleep it simply, sometimes i forgot to reload the fuel and engage the "stardreamer" and miss the right point, a couple of AU to late it might be to late to brake and you won't have fuel reserves to make a lot of maneuvres if you overshoot. overall it needs experience, load to much fuel and you're to slow and will need to much time and even to much fuel, you need to find the right balance for the ship, distance, time.
you need many such "boring" transports to earn enough for a ship with a hyperdrive and then probably a pirate will vaporate you, the will await you more often as i remembered from std. pioneer. i changed them from "slow transporters" to "agressive fighters" and spawn them near to you so you will have to fight.
certainly one likes to get to sol - good luck!
i already think about a hidden mission for that, something special you will earn if you reached this goal e.g. some points which will release further missions or a permission for something which was restricted (one could even just play a fanfare - ta taa 😉 ).
fortunately you can depend on a co-pilot this will help a lot, i'm still clumsy in fighting down enemy ships. fortunately you can escape them often without to battle and if it's a scout mission which spawns an enemy you can most probably trick him by simply rough landing your ship or get very close to the surface, he will crash.
similar to "FE2" i also like to prevent that you can enter certain systems, in my case "alpha centauri" is such a system which is ment to enter it only with permission, it's already an "enclave" and i "only" have to find a way to respect such, similar could be done with any of the factions or at least some of them. many starting locations are already the home system of a faction this i already said i like to get in future from the table of factions and you will be probably bound to this faction except for the independent, federal, imperial & corporated until you reached a certain goal. i.e. some scout missions end already in a different system as you contracted for the mission, this could be extended to if you successfully transferred the data to the client you will earn the permission for a faction - sometimes, i don't like to tell the player which mission that will be, this should be hidden and randomly, if you reached it certainly you will be told that you reached it and of course it should be reflected in your profile which permissions you obtained. it could also be a taxi mission and because you contracted with this or that client you could gain or lose something. attractive ones like in FFE, makes you rich very quick but will prevent you from something which appears later. all should be as much random as possible so that unlike in FFE you won't know in advance which client/mission even if you play it for a 2nd time, you shouldn't exactly know what awaits you. with the "gelios", recently i renamed this beast to "shyrkay", i still have something in mind, i like spawn them at least in the orbit of gas giants what i like to do with them is open, the idea is that you can hunt them but will be fined in some way for doing so or vice versa gain something or both an advantage/disadvantage so you won't know exactly if it's good or not to hunt them, something like whaling in space, could be fined i.e in well policed systems while other systems will even pay for hunting them "charged for the crime of space whaling" :). one could prevent the player to enter i.e. the federation until you did something special to get rid of this criminal record, even this should change from game to game, if i fine you "forever" no one will hunt them at all, but if it's open if you can get rid of the criminal record and the restriction it will be interesting again. this is all future music, recently i'm still creating models and didn't work to much on the mission scripts, this exceeds a little my capabiities, resp. i have to learn a lot. but at least i know what i like to reach and it gets step by step a little clearer how to make of this still bareboned game something which can be attractive to play.
dammit yes, we have the factions and military we just have to do something with that.
The "big burn" method, that takes me back Gernot. 🙂 I used this method all the time in FE2. Was pretty much essential if you had a mission to Alpha Centauri! Using just the autopilot would take far too long. 😮
yes it comes close to this with the exception that there is no getting around this method at beginning of the game. or yes there is a getting around start at "Sol", but you will earn only little money at Sol which means it will take years to get an autopilot and "decades" to get the money for a better ship. to gain 20'000 bucks with a profit of 25 to 100 credits each run won't get you far. systems like "Alpha Centauri" which is again a triple system and a distance of 500AU between the stations will offer you around 500 bucks and more each run.
you are truely a nobody, a "jameson".
like to do some scout missions, to make some extra credits?
you will have to decide to buy an autopilot with your first hard earned money or a radar mapper.
this makes the start to a game without that i had to change a lot of things, i only fitted walterars missions to the posible large distances. the taxi stuff i still didn't solved, i like to have interplanetary taxi missions, so that the "sightseeining boat" makes some sense even if such is in reality out of question, to enjoy a space flight while you meet on the leisure deck and drink some syntherol while you visit mars.
unfortunately the bulletin board is still quickly filled with missions in populated systems with many spaceports. i did my best to remove them earlier, they are removed now after roundabout half of the mission durance, also depending on the urgency, urgent missions will be removed after 1/3 of the durance. perhaps i have to make this even tighter because there is even no way to finish a low urgency mission already after 1/3 of the suggested durance. in very wide systems above 1000AU the missions will stay for many months (up to three and more for scout missions) this fills the bb quite easy with "junk". to restrict that by a sort of limit i didn't find a good option, this will mean that you probably have to wait very long for a mission you can contract to which suits to your lousy ship. some locations might have only three spaceports and one is on a planet with low density, once i stated in such a system and had already to wait almost a year until one appeared to the station which was farthest away from me, on the return i hadn't wait so long, there was only one spaceport in this corner of the system and three in the other. missions which last only a day will be removed after 12 hours, sometimes they get removed this fast you won't have time to stop the stardreamer before it's removed, even if i limited the shortest time to 24hrs. this was needed because i count in days and the logarithm turns "1" to a negative fraction of "1", even if i remove the key signature it will be only a fraction of a day. of course one or two hrs is enough to fly from London to New York, but like i said they will be removed to quick to react on them. the logarithm is needed to respect that i need relatively longer per AU for a distance of 10AU as i need for >100AU or 1000AU. i use a estimated middle of 300000000000 meters per day which is in other terms ~2AU/day. if you lower this you can make it harder or vice versa easier. perhaps it would make sense instead to divide the traveltime to days to do it vice versa to multiply the suggested mission durance to hours, in this way the logarithm will never output negative values and the curve is probably better and even more acute for long distances. i'm not very good when it comes to using a logarithm, in fact it was pretty the first time i used one at all and i'm sure it could be used better if i.e. TomM would do it or guide me through that.
on the other hand i'm satisfied, it does what i expect of it to lower the mission durance more as longer the distance is. maybe a table would be better as to use a logarithm in this way i could control the resulting curve better.
i guess i wrote this already we have multiple systems in pioneer with up to 1500AU, or to say it right this was the widest system i have visited so far i don't know if there is a limit to that, neither i know if we can count such still as multiple star system. it's the problem we have already with "alpha Centauri" is it or is it not? the distance is extreme and it's impossible even in many decades to recognize a movement resp. an orbit of proxima around alpha.
for at least one multiple system i discovered a whole subsystem passing through the giant main star, there couldn't be such a thing it's a impossibilty. the FE2 like structing of them at all is out of the question but ok for a game.
obviousely you get no mass reading for the small companion in this example, not to guess about its planets. however it's sad i couldn't engage the stardreamer because i would have liked to make a clip of the situation when the subsystem passes through the main star and leaves it without to get a scratch from that, in fact it would simply be vaporized or assimilated by the main star, not so in pioneer.
what i wonder at all, does anybody except lunatic gernot have ever explored the outer rim of the explored space? you find many exceptions there, extreme wide systems, contact binaries and even this very strange system.
it was a good idea to start at the outer rim it's also part of the fun. i debated this when we decided to make the galaxy as big as it is in reality, "do you ever will fly this far out? do you still know where you are?" most won't fly this far off to even reach one of the 99 (in my case 150) generated factions, mostly they are far from Sol and coincidentially "150" turned out that at least some was in reach if you start at Sol or any of our common 3 factions. but since you are on the outer rim you will or like to return to sector "0,0,0".
a clip of the WIP
and the link to download this tohouwabohou:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/eorl6z5nwjh11b6/Phoenix0.0.4_Pioneer31.zip?dl=0
your'e right marcel, it could be as well a jet ski 🙂
"big burn", in FE2 respectively the CD32 version of you can fool the game if you save to the non-volatile memory of the CD32 (there wasn't any other option in fact except to save a common savegame to ram which will be erased after a reset), complete the mission even if you're to late, save to nv memory, reload, mission successfully completed, while unfortunately you have to approach a second time, the nv savegame saves resp. reloads the state as you enter the system that's also why you complete the mission successfully because you finished the mission but when you load the time is when you entered the system (sometimes it fails but if you restart the game and reload it should work everytime). usually i avoid missions to "alpha centauri" in FE2.
i played FE2 this spring, started a career in both the PC-DOS version and the CD32 version, i prefere the CD32 version, you can't cheat using the "wormhole bug" and most of all you have the "new zz1 navigation aid" whithout that it can get very boring to zoom always to the navigation targets in system view.
"Frontier" is after all this years still a gem. as deeper i get into "pioneer" as more i respect the work of david braben. all the clever solutions packed into "a couple of kbytes" that really overwhelms me.
certain things we can never reach, like the clever arranged cities from city tiles, sometimes buildings get exchanged on a tile and overall it's not possible with a shaded surface like we have in pioneer. in FE2/FFE the cities fly above the real surface but you won't notice this thus you can arrange the tiles, center the buildings on one corner instead to the center and they will appear in a reasonable way when they are rotated. one must have first all this ideas, i just copy them or try to if it's possible.
damned i thought i can copy this for pioneer and recentered all the new buildings to this scheme until i recognized it won't work, either they stand in the air when they are positioned on a hillside or the whole building vanishes in the hill, stupid me i should have known this.
the tiles would be possible if we (i) would pick up s20dan's idea to flatten the terrain for the cities. first i wasn't convinced of this idea but it would be the best way for pioneer, it would allow me to design the cities from larger city tiles instead of the disorderly arranged way (you might remember that i did that once, but it works halfaways for i.e. London, but it won't work for a city which is placed on a spiky asteroid, the whole city would fly above the ground if it would be leveled to the spaceport.
ok, that's something i still like to get solved, outdoor and underground cities, it's stupid to have common buildings like skyscrapers on a planet with no breathable atmosphere, imo they should be seperated, unbedingt! (there is no getting around).
the only other solution would be to get rid of all outdoor stuff, this would make much more sense because we have 1000's of times more hostile worlds as outdoor and "Earth" (or earthlike) is an exception.
pardon me, but sometimes i guess the designers look only at the situation on earth.
but i guess the "standard" is a system and hostile worlds like i selected for my starting locations.
check them out and you know what i mean.
geraldine,
you will need some patience for the "Sidie" (and the rest of FE2 ships).
i downloaded the recent release and it runs fine on my notebook but i first have to get warm with the changes in pioneer.
it's somehow far easier for me to script a complicated rig as to get into that.
also i still remeber the troubles i had to export animations if they exceed a simple translation rotation (connecting rods problem). i evaded this problem by using .x meshes, but also here, the common blender scripts to export a matrix animation fail. thus i need to install my old blender version because i had i clever scripted exporter for .x meshes which blantantly exported what you see in blender. any else use either "normal keying" or "visual keying" but non of them exports exactly what you see and the animation fails afterwards. if you set the visual keying for especially connectiing rods it mixes all up, that shouldn't be i guess or is a leak of blender, respectively the "advanced" export scripts, shit advanced - "wysiwyg" export exactly what you see this was the right way. unfortunately the old export script won't work for new blender releases.
i miss a lot of things which was very good in blender 1.49, how to create a hose? i've done that before by pressing of a button and even the UV was generated.
there might be a similar script or module for this but now i have to search for every tidbit, in the extended release of 1.49 was all packed in ready to use and also more logical to find. "like to create an object/mesh by a script? look for the script under objects", since 2.x it is i don't know where or you have to start the script from the terminal, very uncomfortable imho.
i think a user won't like to learn how to start a script from a terminal
he will LOVE WYSIWYG press a button and the result is what i expect of by what i see.
as example, before when i leked to create a cylinder i entered the size and divisions before i create the cylinder, logical. now i i have to create the cylinder and enter the divisions and size after it's created, unlogical. it took my a full afternoon only to find where i can enter this, i remembered it's vice versa but i couldn't find that goddamned option anymore it's hidden, unlogical and stupid imho.
likewise the standard to have the "pulldown menus" on the bottom, that's stupid menus belong to the top and not to the bottom who ever had this idea must be an idiot in my opinion, of course i can still have them on top but it isn't the default behave anymore. it's stupid mostly because windows has this strange behave now to show the taskbar even in fullscreen, sometimes it also appears when i play pioneer in fullscreen and instead to press "lower landing gear" i press on something on the taskbar even if it's not visible.
goddamned such can make me very angry it's so stupid and unpractical.
very "useful" if the menu bar of the application is on the bottom, you will constantly click on the taskbar instead to select something from the menu. argh!
reminds me a bit of this:
"new doesn't equals always to better"
most often it's just more complicated, dunno why, developers with no practical experience?
but maybe just to many cooks.
i even don't know if pioneer still supports .x meshes.
and the scotsman he said "nay" 😉
a few words to this:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/eorl6z5nwjh11b6/Phoenix0.0.4_Pioneer31.zip?dl=0phoenix creates now a own directory in "documents" so it won't conflict anymore with "Pioneer" or any other release of pioneer.
there is a small file "phoenix.sdb", it's a compatibility setting (a patch to be exact) created by
Win10 "Compatibility Toolkit" resp. "Manager" (32bit version for a 32bit application, you would have to download that from MS it's not part of the default installation, the .sdb should even work for the win7/8 compatibility manager if this setting is available, the database is interchangeable. overall it's a to recommend tool for everyone who likes to run old windows applications, it comes with a lot of preset patches and searches for apps when installed the first time and applies the recommended known compatibility setting even for countless games and it allows to play i.e. "SimCopter" on a win10 x64 if it's patched right, thus you won't need any other help and it's 100 times better as to play an old game this way as in a virtual machine).
the only thing it does for phoenix is to center the window if phoenix or the modelviewer runs in windowed mode. unfortunately win10 has this strange behave to open certain windowed applications staggered from "top left" to "bottom right", often the apps window appears in a stupid position half off the screen and especially for the by me often used modelviewer this is very annoying.
the patch is setup also for "pioneer.exe" and recognizes the app simply by it's name (it would be possible to patch a specific version recognized checksum, size, vendor or whatever can be readed out of the file of the app to seperate patches if that is needed).
to apply the patch you will need the "compatibility toolkit" (of course), and to load this database into it. after loading it you only have to tell the toolkit (application manager to be precise) to apply the patch - that's all.
a small but helpful thing especially for retro gamers.
"game crashes because the old style file requester won't work? - this is THE help you need".
i guess these are the most important two things.
i moved all documents to a directory "docs"
in it are some docs to "phoenix" where you wil find additional information to what changed while this is all without any warranty that it is up to date or that i listed all changes i've made.
certain things especially to the vast amount of model functions are explained in the scripts themself.
i need to sort that once, while to just play the game all this isn't of interest.
a last tip:
if you start the game there is apart from the random start location still the location "Sol".
it's not recommended to start at Sol, you will gain very little with deliveries here.
BUT
it's quite easy to change this to your preferred start location.
just open "data/ui/MainMenu.lua"
look out for
local yourpath = fixedpath('Sol')
right above this variable is a table (which you must have seen when you open the file)
named "StartLocations", just enter instead of "Sol" any of the names from the table,
i.e. local yourpath = fixedpath('Achernar')
thats it, now you can start always at Achernar, if you like that.
dunno if i can achieve this but coolest would be of course if you could enter the name in the running games mainmenu, on the other hand you won't know what is possible to enter but of course you would remember which system you liked best to start in.
in future i hope i can use the factions table to generate the start locations table.
if you like to switch between the possible 5 starting ships just leave the game to mainmenu and next start you will have probably a different one, while the shuttles are similar in capacity they only differ in look. the lander offers a little more capacity and the dinghy is the weakest of the five.
the performance is the same for all 5 ships, this i reached with a "thrust calculator" which recently uses the tara (hull mass + fuel mass + standard drive (if it has a hyperdrive)) as base, thus if i enter the tara each ship has empty the same (or any given) thrust. equipped are all 5 the same with the exclusion that it would be possible to mount a gun to the "mining vessel", recently this is not of interest because the mining laser is far to expensive to make any senseful use of it. neither i can fit it to the "mining vessel" as standard equipment, or i won't because this would give you again the possibility to bargain with the equipment and exchange the laser for an autopilot or radar mapper, this i don't want. best would be if i could make the mining laser to a non removable equipment of the ship, this would give the "mining vessel" reasonability.
a sixth shuttle is planned (respectively the dinghy will be probably trashed for this) a "container lifter" but it's still in the dock. of corse capacity and cost will be the same, the container it can lift isn't very large, prob. it will have a little more capacity due to that.
if i remember it right you can fit a couple more of extra passenger cabins to the "sightseeing boat", recently it didn't makes sense without interplanetary taxi missions.
all shuttles, the lander and the dinghy can be overload, they have twice capacity as cargo mass.
this means you can fit i.e. the extra passenger cabins and still keep the cargo capacity it has.
but this has a drawback, the ship can hardly lift off a planets surface and will use much more fuel.
also the rest of the smaller ships have some extra capacity it equals to the standard drives mass, this leaves especially for the fighters like the "rapier" more space for equipment but lowers the performance much if you load additional goods or fit a lot of equipment.
a fighter is a fighter and not ment to carry goods from a to b.
unfortunatly the game shows off the thrust for a ladden ship based on capacity and not on cargo space, this i will have to change in future, cargo space (mass) is what is standard capacity. "total capacity" means overloading the ship. thus the values for a ladden ship don't reflect how the thrust is for the common maximum loaded ship it reflects the thrust for the overloaded ship. but hardly you will overload your shuttle without extra passenger cabins, goods or extra fuel you can load only "cargo mass" what is labelled as "capacity" (minus cargo mass) works only for equipment.
in other terms, the "express shuttle" has 10 tons of cargo space and 20 tons capacity, this means you can load 10 tons of goods or extra fuel but you can still add 10 tons of equipment to it this is what will overload the ship. usually you will have only a autopilot and a radar mapper fitted to the shuttles and them are totally only 2 tons. as more equipment you fit as less good will be the performance except you load less cargo equal to the amount of equipment mass.
the shuttles are exceptions, and there is only one other ship which can be overloaded in such a way, the "shyrka" (former "gelios"). this ship as ship will be probably removed in future, but however i will keep the "animalic" part of the ship for the special purpose of "space whaling".
perhaps one can gain the "shyrka" in future as a space ship as reward for completing a special mission. (prevent the "shyrka's" from beeing hunted? shoot down AI "space whalers"? that would be the right idea).
a couple of handy "stapelverarbeitungsdateien" (batch files).
you like to switch between a special fullscreen and a windowed .ini?
then you can put something like this in your "documents/phoenix" (or pioneer) directory and use a shortcut in your games directory to switch between them (assumed you use 7zip and that you put the several pioneer.ini 's in a zipped folder).
"c:program files7-zip7z.exe" e -y "config fs.zip"
for the fullscreen settings or
"c:program files7-zip7z.exe" e -y "config win.zip"
for the special windowed mode settings
they will extract the content of the respective zipped folders.
option "e" is for extract, "-y" means overwrite in quiet mode without asking.
might be you like to empty the model_cache by pressing of a button (especially when you change models often it can stuck and prevent pioneer from running without to tell you a shit what has happened, it's in such a case a quick method to be sure it isn't caused by the cache to simply empty the cache).
del model_cache*.* /q
option /q means quiet, don't show any output.
quick, dirty, but very handy.
the "windowed mode" settings differ in my case mostly for the non-standard resolutions i use for pioneer. my notebook has a resolution of 1366x768 this i use to run it in fullscreen mode. if i like to capture pioneer with either the built in "x-box live" capture device or or with virtual dub i use a resolution of 1152x720 windowed to fit to yt's 720HD mode so the clip won't be streched respectively sized down which lowers the quality much. you could capture very well a fullscreen application using x-box game capture, but it's only to recommend if the fullscreen resolution fits to any of the yt HD resolutions, the next would have a height of 1050.
i said it's a tiny notebook, but it's very good for the exception of the small screen and the extremely limited view angle the screen has, this is what was most critized at the "dell latitude".
low contrast and limited view angle.
wish 'n wash, slap 'n slew?
(i like to do the washmachine boogie with you)
i stripped my long text about the backdraws of a tablet OS.
in despite of that i will repeat myself for a n'th time (perhaps someone new drops in and doesn't knows me).
there is a simple reason why i hang to the lmr, it suits me.
it's limited and whatever but it suits gernot, it has even become a part of my identity.
i fell in love with it at first bite and it won't let me go.
i'm aware that i can work much quicker and do much more with any cad software, but it will never mean the same to me.
"phoenix", i guess i chose the right name for this small project of mine i see as honor to Tom Morton, John Jordan and even the not so widely known Theunis de Jong who all made a good job to show us the guts of FE2. (yech, don't show us YOUR guts gernot)
what's the problem with that, fellows?
TomM with his project "Pioneer" inspired so many of us with his work and for this i'm still grateful.
neither i will forget Geraldine who kicked my ass to take a closer look at TomM's Pioneer, since this moment i'm addicted to it.
"Phoenix" already the name is to remind of all that what inspired us lurking around on Frontier forums. (and waiting patiently for E4)
just imagine where we would be without all that, "pioneer" would be still some not well recognized project somewhere on source forge like countless projects on source forge (which in fact are sometimes sleeping beauties who just wait to be kissed by a brave hearted princess or prince).
perhaps even E4 wouldn't have become true without the pressure from the offsprings of FE2/FFE.
in my personal opinion or as i see the progress over the years, perhaps this whole genre of space sims would look quite different without all of us "space sim veterans", developers AND players.
yes ok some idiot had to the job 🙂 if that was me or anyone else doesn't matters to me.
one thing i still wish since we met on frontier forums is to meet all of you in "real life" (eh the terminal is to me as real as, almost as, something many don't understand), i know to me it's out of question at the time, but it's a wish a dream i have.
hmmm. i guess i'm lame, i get always a little jealous if i notice that the atari and intellivision dudes meet so often in the states. they hold their meetings yearly and we know us (and i even them) only from the web. yes it's a matter of the wallet size i know most of us aren't wealthy unlike some of the collectors in the states (with all their freaky and super exclusive collector items). but on the other hand i must say they even spend more money and time for such occasions. i guess some of them even bypass their own family for such, the whole thing of collecting rarities is that important to some, while ok this goes to far.
perhaps, who knows some of us can really meet one day and exchange the memories we have.
(question, what do you think if i start a crowd funding just for such a meeting and no productive thing is their a chance to collect enough money to hold such a meeting and to pay even the travel costs for some of us? i mean the supporters wouldn't have any profit of that. i guess i should try it instead to speculate about it)
Got it running under PlayOnLinux. I get 7-8 fps at the spaceport no matter what resolution I choose. It looks promising. I'll give it a proper test after I finish some Halloween stuff. 😉
that's pretty lame 7-8 fps, while i assume it's caused because you run it in some kind of virtual windows (?).
i have no idea about linux, for sure it would be an option to windows but my recent notebook is to tight in space for a second OS that i could promise to compile a linux version in the near future. recently i didn't even compiled the win32 Pioneer i use still as base, this simply because it's not yet needed to reach the goals i have with modeling and scripting around the existing old release. once i'm satisfied with that i can caare again about this task (unfortunately i lost the source i used and worked with from around 2015, the source of alpha31 is still available one thing which hinders me also is that the third party sources for alpha31 are not longer available and what is used for the recent releases won't work for some tidbits and i have to reconstruct it and that's a piece of shit. i know this because i started to compile what i found still on my old machine, which like i said before also exhaustet it's last blue cloud of smoke, that was horrible but it happened now for the third time to me so it starts to get quite common. certainly backupdrives would prevent from such but one must have such a drive first. the HD isn't lost neither of the macbook nor from my old machine but also to recover what is on them i need to invest a little money. really such doesn't worries me anymore "shit happens - let's move on"). Fortunately i copied a lot of games and things to the notenbook before the powersupply brok, i assume it's the powersupply, i'm not sure i didn't opened it yet, but the smell of a burnt large eloctrolyte capacitor is pretty telling that it's the powersupply, assuming this my old machine should still run after fixing it but i lost patience with that and the notebook i use is that good i don't have much interest to fix the old crap. it became to me a waste of time in some way to fiddle around with broken or old hardware, i really like to use a computer and not to fix a broken one, perhaps when i'm in the mood for it, i fixed last year an even older one which i took home, it was left on the streetside so it asked for to be carried home. it was an easy thing to fix it, the processor cooling vent was stucked with dust. but it's besides an even older one as my machine and the powersupply i guess won't work it's a quite weak standard one. if im in the mood and recently i'm not (before i pick up the soldering iron for this task i would build a small composite out for my intellivision, that's more important to have for me and i made some theoretical suggests to that so i like to make proof what i claimed. it's because joe and the rest use a cheap pair of transistors for the purpose. in no way i like to say joe doesn't knows his job, apart from being a machine coder he's also a very good electronics engineer, the "LTO Flash" for my inty is his design, but dammit i guess it was my dead father who whispered in my ear "that isn't suitable for an amplifier it's ment for controllers or logical gates and controllers don't mind about oszillating or noise", the composite out is a sort of amplifier however oszillating of the circuit is to prevent at all cost and murphys law tells "every amplifier tends to oscillate and every oszillator tends to amplify". even the exact type i almost remembered immediatly, it surprised me myself. to invest 1$ more for a transistor isn't much money but it can have a big effect on the result. however i digged through the specifiction tables of the vendor and bingo i was right, theoretically at least).
what did i liked to say? transistors?
no!
back to fps and phoenix.
to be honest i reach also only about 15fps, but my notebook has not a good gpu i can't expect more of it and i guess neither i reach more running the official release, it runs quite good but i haven't yet compared the resulting framerate. pioneer makes the notebook sweat and the vent immediatly starts to go on maximum rpm when i start it. the fps i reach are about the same i reached with my old machine and a cheap gpu (yet another broken thingy and the one i used in the last years was an old one i removed from a piece of junk, but better a cheap graphics card as no graphics card.
but also i can't reach better esults with a thinner phoenix, when i started the project i limited it as much i could, near to no dynamic models, no textures, simple buildings, no pilots or extras like this even the adverts i banned, but the impact on framerate by slowly adding one after the other isn't worth to debate about, some single fps, but reaching a final framerate of 16 or 15 is pretty the same. yes the stations and especially, foremost the cities use a lot of fps. it's quite a riddle to me since it didn't gets much better if i use i.e no textures for the buildings. them are simply to many little buildings i guess and something like my "city tiles test" would probably reach better framerate even if the tiles are larger, but you won't use as many of them to display a reasonable looking city (i will see this project still lurks around on my HD so it won't be a big thing to test it). i assume the lmr uses more power to run but on the other hand all models are cached and they should run as fine as anykind of meshes/models. so said i don't reach much better framerates if i use wavefront objects instead of my scripted geometry, in the end it's pretty the same.
perhaps if i disable the random adverts it will be for some fps better, but don't expect no wonder i assume from your 5-6 to 8-10. i know that they eat up fps. but i re-enabled them and didn't noticed a big impact on my notebook. like i said perhaps from 16 down to 15.
similar settings similar fps, after a quick comparison i have to correct myself 20 to 24 for "Phoenix"
24 to 26 for the recent "Pioneer", settings are high, high, and medium for the cities (i ran it before high for the cities to that's why i reached before only 14 -16).
imho no big difference, and to be honest i expected better results of the recent release, at start i wondered "wow 32 fps!" switched to settings and noticed low, low, low "phew" i thought 😉
i know the lmr is clumsy and i'm aware the 100s of functions (modeling helpers) won't make it better in performance neither my global material tables will help to run it faster (while if i remember that right tables are no big problem, they are cached on the hd and have no big impact on performance).
the city tiles could really help to gain fps, since you could run it at low and still get a large city as result. but there is a design problem with them. they look miserable if the terrain is hilly and horrible if it's a steep mountainside. if something like that should work at all the terrain for the cities must be flattened.
but guessing that i use so many new functions, new model functions, even "evil" global stuff i must say what i reach with the lmr isn't really bad. it has an impact on performance but it's for me not worth to think about to change to something else.
using a middle priced gpu it would certainly easy run at 30fps, guessing of that my notebook isn't ment for gaming purposes. it's just a notebook not even a laptop, if you know what i mean, calculators was almost bigger in the '80s and for sure bigger in the '70s 😉 that thing isn't larger as a modern handy, nah ok as a tablet, it almost fits in my pocket.
i could spare most of the new functions for myself, but also to be honest for every function i made i remembered your troubles with the lmr and kept in mind to make it as easy as possible to create models with it, not that i expect that you will, just as a goal.
else i wouldn't have created something like a texturemapper, ok it teached me also many things about U,V, projection i didn't knew so well before, but the idea was really to simplify the model creation with the lmr.
and well
local scale = 1
local radius = 70*scale
local pixels = {25,50,100,0}
local texoffice1 = 'textures/office/office1.png'
local size = v(70,20,50)
--[[
"size" isn't only valid for the projection, as you can see
all vectors refere to this vector, if you change a value here
it will change the whole geometry in its dimensions, since the mapper referes
to the same values it will also keep the texture mapping.
mostly i've done this to fiddle around here with this so you can see
that the mapper is bound to the models extensions
--]]
local diagonal1 = Diagonal[3] -- simple but trustworthy "Diagonal" projection, requested from a table
local diagonal2 = Diagonal[5]
define_model('office1', {
info = {
scale = scale,
lod_pixels = pixels,
bounding_radius = radius,
materials = {'concrete','aluminium','darkgrey','grey'},
tags = {'city_building'},
},
static = function(lod)
local v0 = v(size.x/2,size.y + (size.y/25),size.z/2)
--[[ "v0" is in the upper right corner (viewed from front)
of the building and equals to the maximum extension of "U" & "V",
here it's viewed from the front and the respective section of the texture map
is as well right below half of the textures vertical extension thus the front
projection hasn't to be moved, it's exactly in midst of the texture map,
the building is designed for an easy use of the texturemapper, but if you start
in the upper right corner it will always be "v0" which represents maximum "UV"
and you can use "v0" for the position vector of the texturemapper.
--]]
-- building
local v1 = mirx(v0) -- with mirx,miry,mirz you can easy flip coordinates
local v2 = mirz(v0)
local v3 = mirx(v2)
local v4 = v(v0.x,size.y/25,v2.z)
local v5 = mirx(v4)
local v6 = v(v0.x,v4.y,v0.z)
local v7 = mirx(v6)
-- basement
local v8 = v(v0.x,-size.y*2,v0.z)
local v9 = mirx(v8)
local v10 = v(v0.x,v8.y,v2.z)
local v11 = mirx(v10)
-- vectors for the cuboid function
local cube1 = {v(size.x/4,v2.y,-size.z/4),v(size.x/8,size.y/6.25,size.z/4)}
local cube2 = {v(size.x/4,v2.y,size.z/10),v(2,size.y/25,size.z/12.5)}
local cube3 = {v(size.x/4,v2.y,size.z/3),v(2,size.y/25,size.z/12.5)}
local cube4 = {v(-size.x/8,v2.y,0),v(size.x/8,size.y/6.25,size.z/4)}
local front = texmapper(v0,size,v(0,0,1),v(1,-.25,1))
local top = texmapper(v0 + v(0,0,.5),size,v(0,1,0),v(1,1,-.49)) -- "+ 0.5" corrects
--shifting of the "wrong" divisor "-.49" instead of "-.50"
local side = texmapper(v0 + v(0,size.y*2,0),size,v(1,0,0),v(1,.25,1)) -- size.y*2
--shifts the geometry in the proper section of the map
material('concrete') -- preset materials from a table, recognized by their names (name
--is given)
material('aluminium')
material('darkgrey')
material('grey')
if lod == 1 then
use_material('darkgrey')
-- lod 1 buildings are visible but untextured thus this dark material
end
if lod > 1 then
--top
texture(texoffice1,top[1],top[2],top[3])
-- request values from texmapper output
use_material('concrete')
end
quad(v2,v3,v1,v0)
if lod > 1 then
--front
texture(texoffice1,front[1],front[2],front[3])
texture_glow(texoffice1glow)
end
quad(v0,v1,v7,v6)
quad(v2,v4,v5,v3)
if lod > 1 then
--side
texture(texoffice1,side[1],side[2],side[3])
end
quad(v0,v6,v4,v2)
quad(v1,v3,v5,v7)
texture_glow(nil)
if lod > 1 then
--basement
texture('textures/150.png',diagonal1[1],diagonal1[2],diagonal1[3])
-- request Diagonal projection from global table
use_material('grey')
--front
quad(v6,v7,v9,v8)
quad(v4,v10,v11,v5)
--side
quad(v4,v6,v8,v10)
quad(v5,v11,v9,v7)
if lod > 2 then
-- extras
-- cool function to easy texture a cuboid with the same texture from
-- all sides, tiling or stretching is controlled with the last vector
-- "divisor"
texcuboid(cube1[1],cube1[2],'textures/113.png',v(1,.5,2))
texcuboid(cube4[1],cube4[2],'textures/113.png',v(1,.5,2))
if lod > 3 then
use_material('aluminium')
texture('textures/113.png',diagonal2[1],diagonal2[2],diagonal2[3])
cuboid(cube2[1],cube2[2])
cuboid(cube3[1],cube3[2])
end
end
end
end,
dynamic = function(lod)
-- ventilator
if lod > 3 then
call_model('ventilator',v(-size.x/4,size.y +(size.y/25),-size.z/4),v(1,0,0),v(0,1,0),1)
call_model('ventilator',v(-size.x/12,size.y +(size.y/25),-size.z/4),v(1,0,0),v(0,1,0),1)
end
end
})it can't be much easier as this,
the whole vector listing is based on the size, change any of the size x,y, or z and the whole model will be build and textured reflecting this change.
i'm quite proud of that i can say.
one of the most helpful things i guess are the mirror functions, this let's you write vector listings in "no time", especially for something simple like a building.
the rest is except of the main building (5 quads) and the basement (another 4) all either a model function (cuboid, textured cuboid) or a sub-model of any kind (ventilator).
yes, the ventilators could spare another single fps if disabled ;).
one could create a very very simple building with
texcuboid(v(0,0,0),v(30,10,20),'textures/any.png',v(0.0333,0.1,0.05))
and ready is the textured concrete cube (without any windows, or if the texture has windows on it the roof would have as well because "texcuboid" uses only one texture but maps it from all sides).
and i guess this is worth an impact of a few fps.
PlayOnLinux is a front end for WINE. WINE Is Not an Emulator, it's a translation layer between Linux and Windows. My graphics card plays the Windows version of Mass Effect very well. I'll look at the PlayOnLinux settings. I may have to add some libraries or something.
Looking at that LMR code takes me back to the days when I could get a model into Pioneer. I may try it in Phoenix, who knows?
Speaking of old lost files, I had a faction mod that gave different buildings and stations to the different factions. Actually the player would have to load the mod for the faction they were in manually. The Independent faction had two color stations with the colors generated by the station's name.
that nice laybird again
yes, phew recently this is a knot i can't solve without to change the source.
of course no problem to generate colours by the label (while evwen here, for ships labels had been disabled in alpha31 for preview and the label won't work for ships to randomize something a mean change of which i... whatever i suspected)
recently i use the ships random material to generate i.e. the "legal name" from (i.e. "flying toaster") or to select materials from a own table of preset materials such as the "fe2materials"
but that's not really what i like to get in the end for the architecture problems, much more as random generated or labelled buildings, even if that would be a nice little extra, i would like to seperate them for hostile and outdoor worlds, you this is something i care about since we started.
if i can't have this, all groundstations will be in the near future the type of sealed stations for hostile worlds even on outdoor planets because it mekes more sense as the outdoor type on a hostile world. a similar thought i have for the buildings itself, "type hostile" will be more reasonable for all as "type outdoor".
stations labels (city name in fact) works also well for a couple of new adverts i've created. i dismissed the random adverts and made them simply changing in a given order (while this didn't saved me a single fps) therefore i added a couple of station different adverts. the initial idea was to label some factories different, but since i can't have this i took the name generation for the a few adverts which will show different company names for each station. i guess that's quite good.
wine isn't an emulator you're right i used it on my macbook with yes even very bad results for pioneer or ffed3d, ffed3d was almost playable but pioneer sucked completely using wine, the framerate was below or around 1 fps, absolutely useless even just to check your work (while ok pioneer runs under osx). it's still a sort of virtual machine the whole environment is solved via replacement libs. it's cool that wine exists at all and besides it's better as any else virtual machine, even windows on windows. you can use wine easy for games but it has some limits.
certainly running a lot of scripted stuff is slowing down any machine, all this nice opportunities we have with such high levelled speechy programing languages are only possible due to the extreme gain of speed in the last decades. interpreters are something worse if one thinks right about, but well i'm not "joe zbiciak" and i will never reach to program in machine code. the world will leak of the "joes" once they are dead, i'm pretty sure.
that looks familiar, no?
i revived my hostile spaceport as scripted geometry, t'was a piece of work especially with the changes in docking anim to respect the leaking capability of geometry flagging for collada, the stations are now bound to which animation stage you are in and it seems i can't release the docking procedure anymore by colliding with a special flagged geometry (complete bullshit in other terms).
well, imho it could had been solved by keeping the flagging, collada is a script and it's quite easy to enter any specific data you will need, that could be even something which could be read only by a certain program and will appear as comment for other programs.
in other terms docking works by autopilot but no manual release of docking procedure, i'm not quite sure what all causes this misbehave but i'm unfortunately bound to stage 2 any else won't work to release the docking procedure for ground stations. (a similar probelm i had with the orbital spacestation that's wha it's still unfinished because the docking sequence is destroyed since the use of miserable collada, just to tell it right. besides AI ships can still hang uselessly in the port but it happened only once in the whole travel back to sol from somewhere of the rim of settled space)
once i even found out that it's even bound to collision mesh size (unscaled!) all this are changes which made me once very angry and they come now to surface one after the other. this i found out by rebuilding the "mars station" type from fe2. it's a very large station and i gave it a small size and scaled it up, i searched and searched for the error why the docking procedure wasn't released until i found out that something is depending on the size of the unscaled collision mesh. if i used the same station unscaled 10 times smaller the sequence worked well. somehow it's also bound to collision mesh size (unscaled!) and/or to bounding radius, they had to find a way to make docking animations possible for collada, that's where this change comes from.
not proper at all, in any case you use flagged geometry for such stuff, just guess of lap's in racing games, it's the same stuff, an invisible special flagged geometry you "collide" with your model and you receive the lap or round time. (sometimes it's solved different but i see such rather as a workaround because of certain leaks, eg for old streets of simcity you simply can use the tile you pass with your car and won't need flagged geometry).
due to the opening and closing (which also leaks still somewhat) of the gate i can't use stage 2 to dock i need it to open the gate (i had similar fuzz with the orbital station). i could use stage one but then it takes 5 to 10 minutes to open the gate (durance of stage 1 is the docking timout).
if i guess that all such has worked before....
however, i'm even not sure if my not working manual release is caused by the half sized "hostile port" (scaled up twice, i mismatched the size when i started, i haven't thought of the size of the flowerfairy heavy trader, for the spheric "galactic cruiser" it would have fitted).
the flowerfairy has been gifted with an own texture (yeah), also the XF MKI.
while texturing my scripted copy of the x-wing i found many errors, i must have been in a hurry when i made this model.
back to leaking performance, wine project is grateful for any reports what you play and which problems you have, in this way it can be continousely made better.
a couple of screenshots from the recent changes, while pardon me "1 pic per post" else my posts have to be authored.
label stuff 😉
the font i use recently is another "inty" font based on the standard intellivision screen font.
it's not easy to find a free to use monospaced font without roundings or much serifes, but monospaced works best for the labels
once ment as example how simple a ship can be scripted the xf mk1 has grown to a full model.
changes i've also made to the hullcutter there are now no more parts which cut out occasionally other geometry of it, that was also a hard piece of work to reach and i almost thought there is no way to solve it and i needed many naps to find the solution for this problem.
it's abit a dark color for the xf mk1, but i decided to use the "camouflage colorset" for it, which contains a version of "blood red".
the rest of most ships uses now a set of brighter colors and less greens or dark grey colors. lot of bright steel grey in variations, gold and copper that stuff really looks nice on the ships.
you can influence which colors are selected by specifying a number which i simply add to the seed i use and which i use also to seperate the names for the colors. i.e. you enter "matset1('somecolor',4)"
and the resulting material has the name 'somecolor4' and adds "4" to the generic seed to grant that you can use at least two different per ship (in fact you could use as much variations you like from different tables) odd numbers result in semitransparent material (if the texture has spaces in alpha channel lower as 255), even in opaque. even the standard materials you can use have been simplyfied a lot, material('steel') will select and return "set material,'steel'.....)" (if it's part of the standard material table of course, the selection is name sensitive and you could even specify a different table to use with an optional third variable. i.e. "material('anything',mytable" will return set_material('anything',....) from the table "mytable") you just have to list and use it.
this is because you will use very often the same materials, especially such as "steel", "black", "white", "grey" or "absolute" (an unshaded absolute black), some special ones like "ceiling" which adds a glow and disables shading, it becomes handy for cockpits or rooms if you don't like to use "local lighting" or if the lighting fails and this simplyfies it a lot.
besides in my opinion after using unshaded materials for the sealed spaceport it's somehow the better option as "local lighting". using the glowmap you can control exactly how it should be lit and this is often better as if i use a local lighting. for the cockpits i used both options, pilots and cockpit are locally lit but the ceiling can't be lit proper because the lightsource is usually to close to it, therefore i created material "ceiling". it's really to think about only to use such unshaded glowing material or glowmaps to light things locally up.
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