I need an invisible ship for one mission. For that, I decided to use the shän of the escape pod, and change the base ship image to a blank one (so instead of 36 small pods I have a black image). I decided to keep the masks.
But I don't want the escape pods to become invisible, so I need a new shän. And that's what I've been trying to get to for the past 30 minutes.

Please excuse my incompetence, but there we go. I'm not at all a graphics person.

Here's the error message I get in the debuglog:

"loading ship sprites
error - bad sprite image size
error converting ship base sprite to RLE, shän ID 437
"

Here's the plug, with the two images I want used. I've been following the tutorials, but cannot seem to get it right. I tried putting the shän from the rlëD file into the plug-in, didn't change a thing

So what's wrong? How can I avoid this for any other similar cases (like a ship with the graphic of a planet )?

Thanks.

Attached File(s)

• Untitled_Nova_Plug_in.zip (145bytes)
  Number of downloads: 16

Huh whenever I try to download that file, I receive a zip file with the size of 0.1 KB that contains an empty file.
"Error converting " sounds like you did not convert your sprite PICTs into RLEs. That'll cause problems for Nova, as it weights RLEs higher than PICTs. Thus, if for a shän is available both, a PICT and a RLE, it'll use the RLE, even if it's located in the Data files, not plugin files.

If you like, you can get the file I attached below.
It uses the escape pod sprites (1126/1127) but the shän RID you wrote above (437).
It includes both, the PICTs and the rlëDs.

BTW, I forgot to add, ignore the shďp resource. I used it for testing the ship and just forgot to delete it.

Attached File(s)

• InvisibleShip.zip (2.17K)
  Number of downloads: 9

This post has been edited by Arion : 02 February 2005 - 05:29 PM

Pace (haldora), on Feb 2 2005, 02:31 PM, said:

I need an invisible ship for one mission. For that, I decided to use the shän of the escape pod, and change the base ship image to a blank one (so instead of 36 small pods I have a black image). I decided to keep the masks.
But I don't want the escape pods to become invisible, so I need a new shän. And that's what I've been trying to get to for the past 30 minutes.View Post

A simple thing to do is just set the BaseTransp field of the shän resource to 32, making the ship invisible.

Nova Bible said:

BaseTransp The inherent transparency of the basic sprite images, from
0 (no transparency) to 32 (fully transparent).

What you'll want to do is select any shän, for instance the escape pod, and duplicate it to a new ID. Edit the newly created resource, leaving everything and only changing the BaseTransp value to 32. You'll then need to create it a shďp resource with the same ID as the new shän resource.

Arion, on Feb 2 2005, 11:25 PM, said:

<snip>View Post

Thanks! Worked perfectly. Now I've just got to toy around with the cloak flags to see if I can get it to be almost invisible on the sensors (appearing only when it approaches the player).

Andcarne, on Feb 3 2005, 01:37 AM, said:

A simple thing to do is just set the BaseTransp field of the shän resource to 32, making the ship invisible.

Nova Bible said:

BaseTransp The inherent transparency of the basic sprite images, from
0 (no transparency) to 32 (fully transparent).

What you'll want to do is select any shän, for instance the escape pod, and duplicate it to a new ID. Edit the newly created resource, leaving everything and only changing the BaseTransp value to 32. You'll then need to create it a shďp resource with the same ID as the new shän resource.
View Post

I know, I tried (with the Rebel IDA Frigate), but somehow it still was visible when it entered a system by hyperspace. I don't know why, but that's what I observed (hence the wish to get an invisible ship).

I think a normal cloak is invisible on radar. In order to make it visible, you need to enter a ModVal of 0x02. Below is a list of the different valid ModVals and what they do.
0x01 – Fast fade
0x02 – Visible on radar
0x03 – Drops shields
0x08 – Disable on damage
0x10 – 1 unit fuel per second
0x20 – 2 f/s
0x40 – 4 f/s
0x80 – 8 f/s
0x100 – 1 unit shield per second
0x200 – 2 s/s
0x400 – 4 s/s
0x800 – 8 s/s
0x1000 – Area cloak (don't ask me what that means)

I don't know how a cloaked ship really behaves. It may be that if you check “Cloak while Flying” in the shďp editor, that it'll remain invisible, though I'm not sure. The Wraith, too, appear now and then.

Thanks for the thought, Arion (though I already knew that ;)).

I got it to work just the way I want it to. The interceptor is just the behaviour I wanted, and using the cloak, it's just fine.