And PDBeams "sniping" fighters/missiles?

First off, sorry for being absent for so long, stuff just gets in the way as I'm sure all of you know. Secondly, my main point: Trying to create the smoke for missiles or weapons in genneral. I imported(copy-pasted) some cicn from the Overide port to Nova. No problems yet. Sometimes the smoke doesnt appear after the missile passes. Well, ok, too many "smoke plumes" in the universe, understandable. Creating a .bmp and trying to import it into EVNeW and having it crash every time, not quite so understandable. It might have to do with the new cicn tryign to have too many colors for the resource to handle. I do all my graphics from the GIMP, and I often use the hexadecimal for choosing colors. Say I choose ff8800(orange) but then on the paint bucket I have it set to 10% opascity(sp?), what are the chances of that(too many shades) causing problems?

Next point: I have created some PDBeams for Nova. Ocasionaly I have seen my beams "snipe" ships or missiles. I am unsure which as that the beam gets a boost from the 200 range to something like 2000 or more. I have witnessed this multiple times on multiple weapons(still the PDBeam). I am not sure, but I think I have had multiple of the outfits at one point when it happens. Could that be the issue? I have 3 beams with extreemly low damage and the same range, but the only difference is that they are different colors. They are lightning beams so it looks really nice. The only thing I can think of that might be causing the periodic "snipe" is the multiple PDBeams thing.

(Edit): Did I really type all those errors? ...Fixing...

This post has been edited by WonderBoy : 12 September 2006 - 05:57 PM

If you can figure out what's causing it, that could be a neat "feature". The beams thing, I mean.

For the cicns, I can't help. I prefer to use particle effects myself; I feel they look better.

@lindley, on Sep 10 2006, 09:16 PM, said in EVNeW not liking CICN?:

If you can figure out what's causing it, that could be a neat "feature". The beams thing, I mean.

Oooh! I found a "feature"! Its still annoying though, as its not my intention. But thats how most "features" are found I immagine.

@lindley, on Sep 10 2006, 09:16 PM, said in EVNeW not liking CICN?:

For the cicns, I can't help. I prefer to use particle effects myself; I feel they look better.

For some things they do, indeed, look beter. But its still fun to smoke(both litteraly and metaphoracaly speaking) a carrier with a barrage of missiles.

The conclusion I came to when I last encountered this PD beam "feature" is that it's a bug that potentially occurs when you have a count greater than 1. The beam destroys the initial target before its count is up but must stay on screen for the remainder of the count. It acquires the next target, regardless of how far away it is.

As for the cicns, start by using png. Bitmap is not a real format. This won't solve your problem but you could also try reducing it to 8-bit before importing it. What dimensions are they?

This post has been edited by Guy : 11 September 2006 - 12:06 AM

Well, when I exported the pictures from EVNEW, I got bmps, so I figgured that was the format I shuld use. I like pngs alot, I think they are my favorite picture format IF by dimentions you mean number of pixels but number of pixels then it is the same as what I exported, from 8x8 to a max of 40x40 or 48x48. IF yyou were reffering to color then I have no idea, I will check into that soon. Pardon my typing right now, I'm rather tired...

Oh and on the Beam thing, There is a steady stram of missiles heading at me. Why choose one that is so far from my ship? The relevant stats for my beam are:

• reload:2

• lifetime:1

• Speed(does this matter?):800

• decay:0

• beam length:200

• beam width:3

• corona falloff:14

• lightning density:5

• Lightning amplitude:15

Lemme know if there are any other relevant feilds that might help.

This post has been edited by WonderBoy : 12 September 2006 - 06:05 PM

Count of 1? Okay, I guess it's not what I thought it was. Speed is ignored for beams. It may just be an unavoidable bug with PD beams.

Well I looked at EVNEW. I'm shocked and disgusted to find that it can only import bitmaps for cicns. So I converted my test pic to both 8 and 24-bit bitmaps. The 8-bit worked. The 24-bit crashed. So yeah, there's your problem as I suggested before.

This post has been edited by Guy : 12 September 2006 - 08:14 PM

Yes, cicn's as a resource are limited to 8-bit color, as they were designed way back when the Mac II was created. If you try to paste an image into ResEdit that is higher than 256 colors, the resulting cicn is converted down, usually with horrible distortion. Evidently EVNEW doesn't know how to do the conversion.

As an alternative, you could make a special boom resource and make the weapon a recursively submunitioning weapon. Set the number of subs to 1, the repeat limit to something appropriate, and the count value to the original count divided by the repeat limit.

As for the beams, I have no clue.

@knucklehead, on Sep 14 2006, 05:48 PM, said in EVNeW not liking CICN?:

As an alternative, you could make a special boom resource and make the weapon a recursively submunitioning weapon. Set the number of subs to 1, the repeat limit to something appropriate, and the count value to the original count divided by the repeat limit.

(Edit) Presuming you mean to use the boom resource every frame as a replacement for the smoke...
Interesting hack. However, it has some limitations.

First, its hit explosion would look like the smoke.
Second, and more importantly, guided weapons won't turn in this scheme.
Third, jamming won't get evaluated (or perhaps get re-evaluated every sub.)
fourth, if the explosion does any blast damage, it will damage everything close to its flight path, possibly even damaging the target twice.

A missile takes a moment for guidance to kick in after a sub. So if you are continuously subbing, there will be no turning.
Similarly, jamming takes some ammount of time before the missile is jammed. If you are continuously subbing the missile will never get jammed. If there is enough time before a sub to check for jamming, you'll find that jamming get re-evaluated after every sub. This will skew your overall jamming probabilities. Less chance if the chance was low; more chance if the chance was high.

This post has been edited by Desprez : 14 September 2006 - 01:07 PM

Hmmm.... It seems the easiest way to do this is to figgure out how to do 8-bit coloring in the GIMP....I could just do absolutes and go pixel by pixel to mix and make the desired colors..... but that will be extremely tedious.... any one who is more familiar with the GIMP know how to do this? Help would be greatly apreciated...Untill then I will hunt around in the GIMP for a way to do this but I might try paint(eww). Hell, I might even try to figgure out which hexadecimal numbers are in the eight bit....doesnt seem like it would be too hard....Wouldnt it be absolutes of the three color fields? Some thing like this: 000000, 0000ff, 00ff00, ff0000, 00ffff, ff00ff, ffff00, ffffff right?

Just because you use only 256 colours won't make it an 8-bit image. Go Image->Mode->Indexed.

Ah Ha! Thanks Guy, that shuld do the trick. If it doesn't, I will let the board know.