New "glowing" lasers

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Re: New "glowing" lasers

Bman
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Post by Bman » Sat Apr 06, 2019 7:02 am

Thanks. I see now. Your 3D .opt looks great but proportionally to the craft (I'm testing with an A-Wing) it looks a little large and its hit zone is larger too. Might affect game play. I understand now what you mean, the larger the mesh and ratio of textures ( I call it scaling factor). I kept the same mesh dimensions as DS had it from previous release DSCUPv2.5. Would you mind if I could get your permission to tweak your 3D .opt mesh with a couple of textures and include additional FG maps I already have? I'll post back some results.

Yes, forgot to mention, after you convert all .opts to 32-bit, take your game engine and place it in subdirectory of Jeremy's editor called something like "_32-bit patch" folder and run the executable there. It will patch your game engine and then you're ready to go. All .opt models going forward must be converted or imported as 32-bit textures or game will crash to desktop. You should see a better difference with the gradient affect.
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sedenion
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Post by sedenion » Sat Apr 06, 2019 7:30 am

Bman wrote:
Sat Apr 06, 2019 7:02 am
Thanks. I see now. Your 3D .opt looks great but proportionally to the craft (I'm testing with an A-Wing) it looks a little large and its hit zone is larger too. Might affect game play.
I don't think the lasers hit-box is taken from the 3D model, but rather is managed programmatically. I cannot be sure at this stage since I not tested "scientifically". Anyway, the hit-zone is easy to modify within the opt file, so if the opt parameters is really used as base for lasers hit-zone, this is only a temporary problem, easy to fix.
Bman wrote:
Sat Apr 06, 2019 7:02 am
I understand now what you mean, the larger the mesh and ratio of textures ( I call it scaling factor). I kept the same mesh dimensions as DS had it from previous release DSCUPv2.5. Would you mind if I could get your permission to tweak your 3D .opt mesh with a couple of textures and include additional FG maps I already have? I'll post back some results.
You can do what you want.
Bman wrote:
Sat Apr 06, 2019 7:02 am
Yes, forgot to mention, after you convert all .opts to 32-bit, take your game engine and place it in subdirectory of Jeremy's editor called something like "_32-bit patch" folder and run the executable there. It will patch your game engine and then you're ready to go. All .opt models going forward must be converted or imported as 32-bit textures or game will crash to desktop. You should see a better difference with the gradient affect.
Too heavy operation, I will stay with the 8 bits limitation for now...

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Darksaber
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Post by Darksaber » Sat Apr 06, 2019 7:35 am

If you don't mind I'm going to move this to editing as it's not really XWAUP related
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sedenion
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Post by sedenion » Sat Apr 06, 2019 7:41 am

Darksaber wrote:
Sat Apr 06, 2019 7:35 am
If you don't mind I'm going to move this to editing as it's not really XWAUP related
It is okay. Where can I share my work without being off topic ? Is there a "WIP" category of something like this ?

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Darksaber
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Post by Darksaber » Sat Apr 06, 2019 8:41 am

Anything like this that's not directly XWAUP related, can go in here (editing) or the pilot lounge if you wish to show off any custom craft you happen to make :), if you decide you would like to try your hand at any other cockpits or craft from the progress page then that can go in the XWA Upgrade part of the forum :)
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Bman
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Post by Bman » Sat Apr 06, 2019 3:29 pm

Thanks DS. Hi Sedenion, yes I meant the larger an .opt model the larger it's inherent hit zone (bounding box), but it can be easily be manipulated. Thanks.
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sedenion
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Post by sedenion » Sat Apr 06, 2019 3:54 pm

Bman wrote:
Sat Apr 06, 2019 3:29 pm
Thanks DS. Hi Sedenion, yes I meant the larger an .opt model the larger it's inherent hit zone (bounding box), but it can be easily be manipulated. Thanks.
Yes, a larger mesh automatically generates a larger bounding box, what I said is that I doubt this opt's bounding box - or hit-zone - is used as collision shape for lasers.

To be sure I just made a test, modifying the laser hit-zone to something realy big (twice the size of a Tie-fighter) and as I suspected, the lasers behavior did not change. The opposite would have very surprised me, since using a bounding box collision test for something like a Laser is heretical from a game engine development point of view, this would be wast of calculations for no advantage.

So, you can modify lasers model and hit-box as you wish, there is not risk of gameplay change... the lasers 3D models are only cosmetics, the real lasers is "invisible", programmatically computed "behind the matrix"

Bman
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Post by Bman » Sat Apr 06, 2019 4:58 pm

Here's what I've been working on for months. Notice the faint feathering on fringe of the laser from the still shot. This is what I'm struggling with to add in between the edge of image and the mesh's edge. The last pixels around edge of the mesh should be pure black (transparent) to pack it all in. The first comparison is your texture map and I added more yellow in the core. I removed your vertical square faces just for comparison reasons. The actual "cannon" color RGBA is something like FF,35,26 and alpha channel = pure black. I'll upload these .opts later this evening and/or tomorrow if you and anyone want to test and tweak anything.

RebelLasers4.png

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Last edited by Bman on Mon Apr 08, 2019 2:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
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sedenion
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Post by sedenion » Sat Apr 06, 2019 5:33 pm

Bman wrote:
Sat Apr 06, 2019 4:58 pm
Here's what I've been working on for months. Notice the faint feathering on fringe of the laser from the still shot. This is what I'm struggling with to add in between the edge of image and the mesh's edge.
I don't understand, what difficulties are you facing precisely ?

Bman
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Post by Bman » Sun Apr 14, 2019 3:29 am

Hello Sedenion, see the above image. The faint glow area between the yellow arrow (dots) and green arrows was what I was trying to reproduce. I finally got it to work using your 3D mesh file (LaserRebel.opt file). I was also able to re-scale this file so the outer glow and all is not too large in proportion to the Awing craft and still looks great. I've not tested with other Rebel craft yet. I created six Flight Group texture maps. FG0 is your original texture maps unedited, but may look a little more manageable during flight. For FG1, I resized your texture map to 1024x180, and FG2 to 1024x64 as a test. This last one seemed to achieve the same effect and reduces file size. Finally, for FG3, FG4, and FG5 I added my two texture maps (see above far right images) using 1024x180 for both and just one as 1024x64. If interested in testing the attached file, open in notepad your AWingWeaponColor.txt file or the .ini file and make the following edits, save, then keep relaunching the game to see. Laser power will have to drop to 50% power or less during flight to activate this .opt file.

WeaponColor = 0
WeaponColor280 = 0 <--- use zero, then change to 1, 2, 3, 4, and finally 5
WeaponColor281 = 0
LaserRebel.zip
Oh, this is actually in 32-bit color but you can easily convert to default 8-bit color in XWAOptEditor first and then save. But you may see slight color banding of the glows as a result.


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sedenion
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Post by sedenion » Sun Apr 14, 2019 12:38 pm

Bman wrote:
Sun Apr 14, 2019 3:29 am
Hello Sedenion, see the above image. The faint glow area between the yellow arrow (dots) and green arrows was what I was trying to reproduce. I finally got it to work using your 3D mesh file (LaserRebel.opt file).
Indeed the adjusted size did the job and I like the more drop-like profiled shape of your lasers. I notice now the mines are too straight. However, I would personally adjust opacity and colours. yours are a bit too dark for me. I notably would add some really white thin core, and an adjusted darkness/opacity of the outer orange part of the core. I think reproducing exactly the original movie pellicle color would not lead to the best effect, and it is better to cheat a bit.

Notice that, you can reduce the texture size to fit the original low resolution 256x128, this change nothing to the final render. High resolution texture are not really necessary here since the game engine will almost everytime use any lower resolution mipmap...

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