Amazing work kapuhy
Sorry for not having yet replied your last e-mail. I think you had encountered some problems with the usage of the HarborObjectCtrl controller on some ships. Did you manage tracking down and solving the issue?
Regarding the other problems that you have described:
Quote:
Originally Posted by kapuhy
1) Some stock ships have protholes UV-mapped to the same parts of diffuse texture as other ships parts - namely Ranger tanker, N3 Cargo, Hod Island, C1B Cargo. These ships need their portholes remapped to some other texture part:
|
Yes, you could remap porthole's UV coordinates, or you could assign to them a material/ texture purposely created for them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kapuhy
2) I intended to create just clones, sharing the same model but with different .sim and .eqp files (the way that Duke of York uses KGV model but with different dsd,eqp and other files). It appears that game still uses original ship's sim file, even if modified one is provided in clone's folder.
|
As far as I know, only cfg, eqp and sns files can be used to customize proxy clones. All the other files are from the parent unit. What could be surely done, is separating portholes and navigation lights from the ship models and setting them up as equipment objects to be linked to their respective units through eqp files. For each ship model we could have two porthole equipment item: one lit for neutral ships, and one unlit for non-neutrals.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kapuhy
3) At very close range, the glow disappears (like if camera is within 30-40 meters of the ship). The same happens to port buildings so this is just how this controller works.
[...]
6) No halo. This only lights up texture, without "halo" or "light ray" effect that is visible on lighthouses and .dat format iluminated vessels.
|
Yes, unlike light nodes used to illuminate .dat ships (which cast "real" light) port lights are fake lights. The advantage is that their rendering is not GPU-intensive, the disadvantages are the ones you have described above. You could fake light halos by painting them on the surfaces close to a light source, but that is probably too complicated for the small benefit involved.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kapuhy
4) At very long range, lights also tend to disappear on many ships, this time because portholes are not included in LOD file (exception is C3 where windows are painted on wall texture and my trawler which includes windows in LOD file). This could again be fixed by adding a simple triangle for every porthole in LOD model and UV-mapping it to lit part of diffuse texture.
|
If you follow my suggestion to set up portholes and navigation lights as equipment objects, they will be applied to the LOD models as well as to the main models
Quote:
Originally Posted by kapuhy
5) Navigation lights are not included on stock ships. Rosomaha's C3 and most of my my coasters have them, but on stock merchants they would need to be added to the model.
|
Likewise, those could be added to each stock ships as external (equipment) object