Oolite Bulletins

If the system can't do transparencies then how do we get the exhaust effects?

Oolite can indeed do transparencies, ( other examples are translucent atmospheres & sun coronas ) but the .dat files parser would need to be overhauled to be able to use translucent textures in ship models. And that could potentially add a lot of bugs to the way existing models are rendered, if not done properly.

One possibility that's already available in trunk, and not quite exploited to its full extent yet, is to play with shaders to see if we can create a translucent effect.

Maybe the burning wreckage Griff made could be used as a starting point - it already mixes transparent & fully opaque pixels within one texture plane.

Still, I must confess I'd very much like to see Scarecrow's Seraphim, even as a wip oxp... he managed to find a fairly low-tech way to get translucency, and hopefully he'll be back to the board at some point in the future!

OK next question; if you have a sub entity infront of your laser will it zap the sub entity and not what your pointing at?

I'm working on some ablative armour. (non-trek)

Most definitely so! Ablative armour should work without a problem.
<edit>: I definitely misunderstood your question! Not sure about that one... you might have to use two shells, leaving some space around the laser to be on the shafe side... </edit>
Are you going to assign death actions to the armour? You can get NPCs to use the comms when you blow a subentity, change their AI depending on which subentity was destroyed, etc...

PS call me cheap, but I would have simply reused the main ship texture for the ablative shield, maybe tweaking the overall hue, then I'd go back to the main ship texture & add the shield attachment points to it.

ClymAngus wrote:

OK next question; if you have a sub entity infront of your laser will it zap the sub entity and not what your pointing at?

I'm working on some ablative armour. (non-trek)

You can, or are meant to be able to, not sure if its working, set the origin of the laser in 3 dimensions, so you can certainly set it to start in front of the subentity.

Cmdr James wrote:

You can, or are meant to be able to, not sure if its working, set the origin of the laser in 3 dimensions, so you can certainly set it to start in front of the subentity.

It is not working in versions between ca 1.70 till 1.72. Kaks noted that he fixed this for 1.73. It also works in 1.65. So to test laser positions when you don't have 1.73 you can possibly use that old Oolite.

but a subentity that dipped behind the origination point of the laser wouldn't suffer from a problem like this in any version yes?

If the laser does not strike the entity then it will not take damage. I think this is one area that the collision detection is certainly good enough