With regards to neutral merchant lights
 

http://img390.imageshack.us/img390/64/l57et.jpg

(With thanks to CCIP for the image)

Does anyone know how the building textures are changed for nighttime? Would it be possible to the same to neutral merchant skins?

Hmm, there's a creative idea. :up:

Does anyone know where these textures are stored? Maybe there IS a glowing texture there that we don't know about :hmm:

I wonder if they do change textures for night time?

My guess is that certain specific colour values are "earmarked" by the engine as ones that glow (i.e. no light is applied). Hmm...

Thats a brillent idea oRGy, I'd love to see neutrals lit up at night. If this is possible it would be marvelous

Hmm.. it could be the game engine will only use these on buildings, of course.

More likely is that using the textures on freighters, if it works, will also make them appear lit up more than they should during daytime.

Presumably.

My concern is that since the merchant ships use the same textures whether they are enemy or not would that not mean that if you put lights on say a coastal merchant that the neutrals use would you not see the same lights on the enemy coastal merchant in game?

I believe you can get around this by using country-specific textures. At least, that's what sergbuto said in my 'neutral traffic' thread.

That would be great if you could...That would add that much more to the sim.

There are only two ways around this I can think of. Either clone the existing merchants to allow for nationality-specific coastal merchants, c2's etc or assign certain classes of ship only to neutral countries, using the data/roster files.

would be interesting perhaps more so for early war American ships as i have read that not only did they carry huge American flags painted on the sides of the hull ..but they allso flood-lit them to make doubly sure there was no chance of mistaken identity..?

now then here's the way to do this trick i reckon re the lights etc..forget the actuall merchant vessels them selves and concentrate on the cargo on the decks...these can be altered seperately from the actual vesels and i believe can be used on any vessel (?) ...so take one of the deck cargo textures and replace it with the lighted window texture from a night time building.. and bingo you have lights on any merchant you please simply by stipulating the lit window deck cargo in the cfg file... :up:

[Equipment 1]
NodeName=M01
LinkName=CratePileL
StartDate=19380101
EndDate=19421231

[Equipment 2]
NodeName=M01
LinkName=PlatformL
StartDate=19421231
EndDate=19451231

[Equipment 3]
NodeName=M02
LinkName=CratePileL
StartDate=19380101
EndDate=19401231

I think the building textures are in data\library\Habor_kit.dat. There are some nighttime building textures there too, though I have no idea what triggers some windows to be lit up. I'll leave that to those with modding skills. :)