[Deamon]

Originally Posted by Chad

Somethings I will need help with is re-doing some of the water. Currently, I love the way the water looks, except whenever something is below the water line, it doesn't distorn correctly. I want the water plane to be somewhat transparent but not like it is now.

Perhaps you should post some screenshots that show the problem.

I own a license to particle candy, and have not found an effective way to implement this without destroying my frames per second when having 20-30 ships on the screen at once. I might just have to overhaul the entire smoke particle.

What haven't you been able to implement effective ? I find your describtions somewhat diffuse.

how to create way points for the ships.

Simple define a destination coordinate.

Right now I'm just using translateentity ship1,0,0,90 and it just travels a straight line to the end of the map. I'd like to be able to make some ships travel different patterns, such as zig zag, or go from port to port, etc.

Well the first thing you should learn is how to make a ship follow waypoints.

The basic thing you need for this is of course is a destination coordinate and a function that turns the ship towards it.

Obviously for this you need the current orientation of the ship in question and the relative bearing to the waypoint.

If the bearing is a negatigve value turn the ship to port till the bearing is 0, if the bearing is a positive value then turn it to starboard till the bearing is 0.

You will also need the distance between the ship and the waypoint. When the distance become smaller than a certain treshold you switch to the next waypoint as a destination or do whatever you need the ship to do at this waypoint. So the way point object need to contain orders of what the ship is supposed to do next.

This is of course a simplified describttion but when you got this the rest will come natuirally. How such operations like taking bearings or read out the orientation of an object in blitz3d, I don't know. It's long back that I worked with it.

For this stuff you need vector math but as far as I can see blitz don't seem to provide this sort of functionality. So I guess you are on your own then

Perhaps there are some vector math libraries for blitz out there, but what do I know ?

Lighting is a big one, I don't really need real-time stencil shadowing, but, on the boat I'd like 2 lightmapped scenes, the normal white light, and the rigged for red light.

If you don't use real lights in your boat then you could simple put a red transparent texture over your normal texture and switch it on whenever your rig the boat for red.