How do you do this?

I am trying to get some ships with large shield ranges while others have small shield ranges. I was first sent to edit the masks but the masks did not, in my experience, do the trick. I was led to this conclusion when I changed a ship's mask to something larger (pegasus, for instance) and the ship still had the original "shield" size.

I have fooled around with the ship's sprite and that DOES change the shield radius, however, it is very time consuming, as well as odd-looking, to expand the ship's sprite.

I think it's possible I'm led astray by the fact I know very little about the sprite or the mask. IF someone could explain what each is and more importantly how the easiest way to expand a ship's "shield" size, I'd appreciate it.

(By the way, when I say expanding the ship's shield size, I mean when the ship will experience impact from a weapon projectile.)

Hmmm... Difficult wish you've got here, at least how I'm understanding it. I guess you could just create a larger black circle around the ship in the sprite, so this would count as part of the ship, it would just look weird when you went to land. I suck at working with ships, and am much better with weapons, so I guess we'll just have to wait until a ship guru comes around. From my understanding, though, the sprite is just what you see, and the mask tells nova where the ship is. But there is a high probability that I am wrong. (10,098,725,381 to 1 against for me being correct). I've noticed a similar phenomenon, though. If you fire at an Aurora Crusier as it is facing you, the shots tend to go right over it and not do damage. Could this be related? This sounds like a very cool idea, I hope you can get it to work.

Indeed, Pigdog, you are right (to an extent).

The mask tells the game where the bounds of the sprite are, and only the areas in white (in the mask) will be displayed, while the others will, in effect, be transparent. The only two ways to make a ship a bigger target is to either increase the proximity detonation off all weapons, or to simply make the sprites bigger somehow. Both have the problem in that once you destroy a ship's shields the ship will still be a bigger target. Frankly, I just don't think the engine will let you do what you want.

What is the ship you're trying to modify? And how did you go about giving it a mask from a pegasus? I ask because RLEs don't have separate masks so the mask fields do nothing. If you just gave your ship the same mask value that the pegasus has then it wouldn't have worked. The best way to do that would be to extract the mask from your ship and expand the white area.

You could also try making a shield sprite for the ship with a large mask area and see if that works.

This post has been edited by Guy : 15 December 2004 - 07:06 PM

Guy, on Dec 15 2004, 05:00 PM, said:

What is the ship you're trying to modify? And how did you go about giving it a mask from a pegasus? I ask because RLEs don't have separate masks so the mask fields do nothing. If you just gave your ship the same mask value that the pegasus has then it wouldn't have worked. The best way to do that would be to extract the mask from your ship and expand the white area.

You could also try making a shield sprite for the ship with a large mask area and see if that works.
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Yes, I thought I could be mistaken. I was fooling around with a Cargo Drone and left the Cargo Drone's sprite while changing the mask to the Pegasus.

The reason I was asking is I am working on a plug-in where I wanted certain ships to have very large shield radii'(sp?) that would provide that government with an advantage. These ships would also make good escorts for the player as they provide blanket shielding over fleets. However, it looks like the only way to accomplish this is in a very graphically blunderous way. Disappointing

Maybe this is a good idea that could go into the next EV--provided there ever is

Shield bubbles.

Wait... shield bubbles work that way? I didn't think of them until after my post, but I didn't realize that they actually stopped bullets... If they did, it would be the exact solution to the problem.

Assuming shield bubbles don't change the effective hit-area of a craft; you could set the base sprite up as your shield bubble, but set it's inherent transparency to 100 (which I think makes it 100% transparent - I can never remember whether it's 100 or 0). Then you'd use the shan's alt-frames as the visible portion of the ship.

It's a great idea though.

Shield bubbles does not work.

Then give my suggestion a try. It'll definitely work and you won't have that black disc you referred to, but it has clear draw-backs.

Hudson, on Dec 16 2004, 09:44 AM, said:

Assuming shield bubbles don't change the effective hit-area of a craft; you could set the base sprite up as your shield bubble, but set it's inherent transparency to 100 (which I think makes it 100% transparent - I can never remember whether it's 100 or 0). Then you'd use the shan's alt-frames as the visible portion of the ship.

It's a great idea though.
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I'm not entirely clear on your idea, Hudson. From what I understand, the sprite the ship is configured to will be entirely transparent. Then, its alternate frames are the visible ship.

Would the alternate frames always be active while I flew my invisible ship around?

For a less useful, more time-consuming method, you could increase the proximity radius of every weapon.

PigDog4, I've noticed a similar thing in the EVO port when shooting at Igazras. That should keep you up at night wondering, what grand conspiracy created this? :unsure:

I guess it just goes to show, large flying penises aren't meant to be shot at.

Aryan, on Dec 16 2004, 11:51 PM, said:

I'm not entirely clear on your idea, Hudson. From what I understand, the sprite the ship is configured to will be entirely transparent. Then, its alternate frames are the visible ship.
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Yup

Aryan, on Dec 16 2004, 11:51 PM, said:

Would the alternate frames always be active while I flew my invisible ship around?
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Yes they would. The alt-frames are actually layered onto the base sprite on a layer all of their own. So, yeh, I'm pretty sure it'd work, I haven't tested it or anything. It's worth a look though.

Klepsacovic, on Dec 18 2004, 02:32 AM, said:

For a less useful, more time-consuming method, you could increase the proximity radius of every weapon.View Post

But that wouldn't actually achieve the effect he wants; a ship that has a kind of protective bubble that can shield other ships within that bubble. Building a ship with an enourmouse hit-area is the only real way of doing it.

Okay, Hudson. Yesterday I spent some time with Adobe/Paint and accomplished your idea. The drawbacks are that the black disc, which I configured to be the ship's sprite (black blends in well with space, yes?) will overlap the planets and other ships, making this ship look rather odd. It has a very dishonest look so I'm thinking of making the actual shield look like a shield so it looks more consistent with the idea.

Also, a drawback is that the transparency affects the entire ship, alternate sprite included,, which is why I couldn't make the ship 100% transparent.

Anyhow, this problem looks like it's solved as much is possible. I want to thank you Hudson

Shield bubbles do work. Make a shield bubble the size of the radius you want. The blast stops at the edge of the shield before it ever gets to the ship sprite.

Aryan, on Dec 15 2004, 06:25 PM, said:

I am trying to get some ships with large shield ranges while others have small shield ranges. I was first sent to edit the masks but the masks did not, in my experience, do the trick. I was led to this conclusion when I changed a ship's mask to something larger (pegasus, for instance) and the ship still had the original "shield" size.

I have fooled around with the ship's sprite and that DOES change the shield radius, however, it is very time consuming, as well as odd-looking, to expand the ship's sprite.

I think it's possible I'm led astray by the fact I know very little about the sprite or the mask. IF someone could explain what each is and more importantly how the easiest way to expand a ship's "shield" size, I'd appreciate it.

(By the way, when I say expanding the ship's shield size, I mean when the ship will experience impact from a weapon projectile.)
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I believe you were influenced by my idea in the 'Ideas for Outfits' thread, were you not?

(EDIT): Even though it probably doesn't matter, your 'Progress Log link is broken, Nuncle Twitchy.

This post has been edited by Anaxagoras : 18 December 2004 - 08:06 PM

UncleTwitchy, on Dec 18 2004, 05:32 PM, said:

Shield bubbles do work. Make a shield bubble the size of the radius you want. The blast stops at the edge of the shield before it ever gets to the ship sprite.
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Uncle Twitchy-
I am curious if the matter is as simple as that. My first response was to test shield bubbles. I started with my own graphics and that was fine since the effect worked. The problem, though, was the desired effect wasn't accomplished. I made VERY large shield bubbles, and though the effect was triggered graphically speaking, the projectiles did not stop at the shield bubble's edge as I had intended. Perhaps I am overlooking something and my conclusions were reached too hastily..

Anaxagoras-
I stopped reading the outfit thread pretty early as I felt people weren't reading it before posting their say-so and thus very little was being learned from it. Also, I don't like to rely on other people's ideas as I generally feel they are either faulty or I'd be accused of copying. So, to summarize: No, I didn't purposely mimic your idea. However, Einstein could be right; Great minds think alike

This post has been edited by Aryan : 19 December 2004 - 12:04 AM

To be sure, I decided to test shield bubbles several times once more. Again, I was unable to make the projectiles stop at the edge of the shield bubble. My conclusion again is that you cannot do such a thing and that shield bubbles are purely for aesthetic purposes. So, please, prove me wrong. It would save me the trouble of using new awkward graphics!

This post has been edited by Aryan : 19 December 2004 - 06:11 PM

Maybe they don't stop at the edge of the shield bubble, but do they deal their damage when they hit the shield, or when they hit the ship? If you position your ship in such a way that the shot passes through the bubble and out the other side without actually hitting the ship, do you still take damage?