Cosmetic Lasers

[Commander Wilmot]

I was wondering if it would be possible to add dual lasers for cosmetic purposes; the player's ship would have only one laser still. I was thinking that for oxp ships which have dual lasers, the player should have two, because on some ships it would look better; Could someone adjust the laser position variable so that you can have two values that would show the laser beam twice.
Like so:

(borrowed the picture from another game I play)

[Smivs]

'fraid not, sorry.
The reasons why have been covered many times elsewhere on this forum, but the bottom line is, as the game stands, player twin lasers cannot be done.

[Commander Wilmot]

Clarifying Statement:
Ok, but my understanding was that multiple lasers for player ships were impossible, I was not talking about twin lasers for the player, I was wondering if it would be possible, in a future version, to make the laser appear twice. I'll take your word for it that it's in the source code.
(Don't respond if the last statement is true)

[Smivs]

As a cosmetic idea it's quite nice....it certainly would look cool. The single laser is sort of hard-coded in as far as I know, but it might be changeable.
You can change your laser colour, if you want to improve the look a bit.
Open your shipdata.plist (in the 'Config' folder of your ship's OXP) and add the line

Code: Select all

"laser_color" = magentaColor;

which will give you a magenta laser (like the Vipers).

You can find a list of the available colours here.
A word of warning:- if changing plists, always make a copy before you start so you have a record of the original (in case anything goes wrong), and DON'T use notepad as it breaks them by adding un-wanted characters. Use Notepad++ or gedit or something else.

[Commander Wilmot]

Thanks, everyone's been every helpfull. I have a custom skin on my diamondback, maybe I should change the laser color as well... I always back up my mods and the original files,

[DaddyHoggy]

There was, briefly, talk of splitting the output for a single laser into two beams, as per the original C64 (and others?) version of Elite - but as, I think Ahruman, pointed out, how would it work? Where would the beam focus? Would there have to be a convergent sweet spot? Would the beams cross (and look silly?) What if one beam hit and the other didn't - half damage? Therefore = too complicated for the sake of cosmetics?

(I was wondering with all this new whizzing scripting stuff in 1.75 if the beam position couldn't be rapidly moved between positions either side of the centre line thus giving the impression of two beams - although I suspect this would happen at a much slower than frame rate rate and thus would look silly and at best make even a mil laser look like two pulse lasers...)

[JensAyton]

You can find a list of the available colours here.

Lasers can have any colour whose HSV brightness is ≥ 50 %.

(I was wondering with all this new whizzing scripting stuff in 1.75 if the beam position couldn't be rapidly moved between positions either side of the centre line thus giving the impression of two beams - although I suspect this would happen at a much slower than frame rate rate and thus would look silly and at best make even a mil laser look like two pulse lasers...)

It wouldn’t work. Laser entities don’t track the parent ship at all.

[Commander Wilmot]

Two questions.

• One, is it possible to have a custom texture for the laser? I think this was done for the kamikaze drone in the armoury oxp.

• Two, is possible to have clear as a laser color? If so would it be invisible (so you could have stealth npc ship with invisible lasers.)

[JensAyton]

No, and explicitly no.

[Kaks]

• Two, is possible to have clear as a laser color? If so would it be invisible (so you could have stealth npc ship with invisible lasers.)

You can always try black as the laser colour, and see what you get...

[DaddyHoggy]

• Two, is possible to have clear as a laser color? If so would it be invisible (so you could have stealth npc ship with invisible lasers.)

You can always try black as the laser colour, and see what you get...

That would fall into the same category as "Black Flashers" that I asked before a few years ago before Ahruman carefully explained just how the flasher code worked...

[Commander McLane]

• Two, is possible to have clear as a laser color? If so would it be invisible (so you could have stealth npc ship with invisible lasers.)

You can always try black as the laser colour, and see what you get...

Both blackColor and clearColor are supported colour names in Oolite. So you can very simply try them out. You'll be disappointed with the result, though.

[Kaks]

Yep, nothing better than a bit of personal experimentation, quite a few times it's faster than this already pretty fast forum!

I suppose the next question would be 'what about dark grey?' - it might well work, if 'somewhat' brighter than what you were hoping for!

[JensAyton]

Lasers can have any colour whose HSV brightness is ≥ 50 %.

[Kaks]

& anything darker gets automatically bumped up to said 50% brightness.