Oolite Bulletins

I just had a brainwave, and thought of a bit of a cheat for ships to have semi-transparent canopies: we could use frozen, dim flashers to give the idea of a glass like substance!

In order to make the 'glass' canopy behave a bit like a solid object, we'd have to do some trickery via oxp: we could add a proper riblike structure around it as another ship subentity, and turn off flashers when the ribs are destroyed...


Enabling frozen, dim flashers does require some code changes, but nowhere near as many as enabling true transparency. In fact, I'll stick my neck out & say it could be implemented in a few hours...

What do you guys think?

Nice idea! Could be pretty for some entities (e.g. Ramirez AstroFactory) .-)

Kaks wrote:

I just had a brainwave, and thought of a bit of a cheat for ships to have semi-transparent canopies: we could use frozen, dim flashers to give the idea of a glass like substance!

In order to make the 'glass' canopy behave a bit like a solid object, we'd have to do some trickery via oxp: we could add a proper riblike structure around it as another ship subentity, and turn off flashers when the ribs are destroyed...


Enabling frozen, dim flashers does require some code changes, but nowhere near as many as enabling true transparency. In fact, I'll stick my neck out & say it could be implemented in a few hours...

What do you guys think?

Are you still here? Go! Go! Go!

You could make it flash incredibly slowly. say once every 2 hours or so. It's a bit of a fudge but it might work.

ClymAngus wrote:

You could make it flash incredibly slowly. say once every 2 hours or so. It's a bit of a fudge but it might work.

Also depends on whether a flasher starts in on- or off-state. If it's on, it's fine. If it's off, not so much.

couldnt you put two flashers in the exact same position and colour. and have it so while ones off, the others on? That would work wouldn't it?

Normal flashers start at 0.5 intensity, increasing, if the phase is zero. By manipulating the phase, you can select any starting value you want.

As a special case, as of 1.74 flashers with a zero frequency are always at full intensity.

Ahruman wrote:

Normal flashers start at 0.5 intensity, increasing, if the phase is zero. By manipulating the phase, you can select any starting value you want.

As a special case, as of 1.74 flashers with a zero frequency are always at full intensity.

Flashers are always round aren't they?

Yes.

Because they’re billboards with no particular orientation pretending to be volumetric, only spherical profiles are possible.

Ahruman wrote:

Because they’re billboards with no particular orientation pretending to be volumetric, only spherical profiles are possible.

Flashers are billboards?

I don't remember that from Your Ad Here!?

JazHaz wrote:

Ahruman wrote:

Because they’re billboards with no particular orientation pretending to be volumetric, only spherical profiles are possible.

Flashers are billboards?

I don't remember that from Your Ad Here!?

We all thought it - only JazHaz was brave enough to step up to the plate and swing wildly at the set up...

Ahruman wrote:

Normal flashers start at 0.5 intensity, increasing, if the phase is zero. By manipulating the phase, you can select any starting value you want.

As a special case, as of 1.74 flashers with a zero frequency are always at full intensity.

Yep, I was thinking of finding an easy-ish way to allow zero frequency flashers to be dimmer than max intensity ( plus another minor tweak ) to make the 0 freq flashers look less flasher-like... Still, it looks like I won't be near a proper computer for a week or so, so don't hold your breath waiting for me to do the deed...

Kaks wrote:

Yep, I was thinking of finding an easy-ish way to allow zero frequency flashers to be dimmer than max intensity ( plus another minor tweak ) to make the 0 freq flashers look less flasher-like...

You can make them as dim as you want using dictionary-form subentity specifiers. The call to +brightColorWithDescription: seems to have disappeared somewhere along the way…

What you can’t do is make them not glow. If you make them very dim they’ll become invisible, not dark.

Ahruman wrote:

If you make them very dim they’ll become invisible, not dark.

Oooh! A way of making transparent things!

Hey, job done, and I didn't even need to spend a single minute tweaking the code... That's what I call maaad skillz!