I'm not too sure on the specifics, but it looks like the actual boundary of the radar screen would have to fit inside the radar 'circle'. In other words, you'd have a blind spot near the top, bottom, and sides of the circle where the dots would disappear. I don't think you can configure the game to have an inherently circular radar.
If, however, you made the circle the same color as the blips...
That has the drawback of IFF decoders not being compatible though.
So there's no good way.
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If, however, you made the circle the same color as the blips...
That has the drawback of IFF decoders not being compatible though.
So there's no good way.
It might work if the IFF was 'built into' every playable ship via an included outfit. After all, in terms of plot, if you can build interstellar warp drives and massive spacefaring battleships, surely a simple IFF decoding chip should come as standard equipment. Of course, you can spin plot a milion different ways. You can, however, use something like what I mentioned as justification and make it work nicely, if you so desired.
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Does the graphic overlap the screen? My assumption is that the screen is lust laid on top of everything, and since it's part of the engine, you can't change its shape.
IIRC, the boundaries for most of the displays and status bars in the interface are defined in terms of their corner locations (?), so they have to be rectangular in shape.
Actually, if you think about it, a rectangular or square radar screen itself doesn't make much sense. It would mean that, regardless of where you were pointing, your radar reaches outwards in 4 constant absolute directions of the universe progressively further than anywhere else. The corners that extend further, technically, than the sides, are an EXTENDED range. Making a circular HUD around the radar may take off the corners, but what it's really doing is eliminating an advantage that doesn't make sense.
Fnoigy, on Aug 29 2005, 09:39 AM, said:
Making a circular HUD around the radar may take off the corners, but what it's really doing is eliminating an advantage that doesn't make sense.View Post
That is quite true, but it is not possible to "cut off the corners." To make a round radar screen, you would need to add non-functional curves on each side, so there would be no change in the nonsensical advantage.
Now, if the non-existant EV4 were to include a "square/circular radar" option...
Edwards
UE_Research & Development, on Aug 26 2005, 02:32 AM, said:
It might work if the IFF was 'built into' every playable ship via an included outfit. After all, in terms of plot, if you can build interstellar warp drives and massive spacefaring battleships, surely a simple IFF decoding chip should come as standard equipment. Of course, you can spin plot a milion different ways. You can, however, use something like what I mentioned as justification and make it work nicely, if you so desired.
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No what he was saying that IFF would cause it to not work. You simply can't have IFF else you'll get all sorts of coloured blips rather than just a single colour which you can easily mask.
Unless you made the border polka-dot...
Polkadot? Why not capture some snow from your TV?
Oops, I forgot all about interference. That's right.
You could just have the circular edges be part of the screen. So you have a square screen with a circular radar showing up on it. Would look better like that anyway, since the circle has to be uniformly the same color as the blips.
All right, definitive answer time.
Therefore, if you want to truncate the corners of the radar screen, you can do so by putting a round background, the same color as the radar dots, around the radar area you want displayed. However, you cannot ever let that ship have an IFF Decoder, otherwise the radar's background will display on top of the round border, turning the radar square.
Also, it appears that interference cannot be made larger than 64x64 pixels, and is tiled across the entire radar square, so you probably couldn't use interference with a round radar and have it look good.
Conclusion: A round radar is possible, but it probably would have several major limitations.
Edwards
A circular radar screen HAS been done before, i just cant remember the exact post where the person displayed. It is possible.
I have no idea how to do it.
Don_Quixote, on Sep 1 2005, 08:10 PM, said:
A circular radar screen HAS been done before, i just cant remember the exact post where the person displayed. It is possible.View Post
I cannot find the post, but I believe it was from the Hostile Waters TC. According to the post, it was done by making the radar square smaller than the circle, thus leaving blank curves on all four sides, as well as giving the radar a much smaller range. Not a very satisfactory solution.
Edwards
Huh, I don't remember us doing anything like that. Must've been a different plug.
Now that I think about it, an oval shaped radar would also cut the corners off, and leave the sides blank, but less so than a circle. And it's still more realistic than a rectangle.
As for the IFF problem, the border could be made out of a jumbled multicolored mass of pixels that are the same colors as the ships in the radar. And if that didn't cover them up, it could be animated (could it?). That would assure that no one would ever see the ships outside the circle.
nuku, on Sep 3 2005, 07:53 PM, said:
As for the IFF problem, the border could be made out of a jumbled multicolored mass of pixels that are the same colors as the ships in the radar. And if that didn't cover them up, it could be animated (could it?). That would assure that no one would ever see the ships outside the circle.View Post
No, that wouldn't work. As I tried to make clear in my "definitive answer" post, the IFF upgrade causes the entire square background of the radar to turn black, regardless of what the sidebar looks like.
Also, you can't make the sidebar be animated.
Edwards
It's a pity the sidebar isn't a DITL - if it were, this could be possible given enough work (you'd need tons of little black rectangles arranged at the corners of the circle above the radar screen). Oh well.
The Apple Cřre, on Aug 30 2005, 01:27 AM, said:
Polkadot? Why not capture some snow from your TV?
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Because it would have to be a last resort. With Photoshop, and maybe possibly other image editing programs, just add noise, turn that square of noise to add more noise variation, and there you have it, that's what I did when I made EVOSI.
