Epic (Dogs or War etc) - any news?

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20 years 1 month ago #11705 by Second Chance
It's been a while since I've seen the default lighting, but I believe there's a default star light as well. There must be a default LW scene for maps, although I am unable to find it. The color being the same as you intended must have been a coincindence, since both the star and ambient light colors come from the scene file. And the map file only provides the color for the star texture. Using a non-yellow star in the map should still get you the same lighting.

Since I have no idea how the traffic scripts work, I don't know if the traffic was a coincidence or not. But I'd love to find out! When I was testing maps without LW scene files they were isolated, with no way in or out. So I never got any traffic. I'm interested to hear what you find out.

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The Ultimate Guide To Modding: I-War 2 - Edge Of Chaos (on hold during SW MP mod)
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20 years 1 month ago #11710 by mdvalley
I haven’t been able to reproduce the traffic, but I made some discoveries.

One, my Epitaph is way too big. You can’t see the star from more than 4.5 billion km away, and my farthest planet is about 7.6 billion.

Two, the star flare seems to be hardwired. When I removed the LWS file from Epitaph, the star flare was still blue. In fact, I couldn’t get it to change at all when I put the LWS file back in and started playing with the <star> settings. The flare intensity value made no difference, and upping the light intensity only made the halos on planets flick from blue to white as I turned the ship. Even the light color makes no difference in the flare. Very strange.

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20 years 1 month ago #11716 by Second Chance
Ok, I believe I might have a solution for you.

The reason why messing with the flare options in the LW scene won't change anything is because the star lights don't use any LW flare options. Also, the flare would probably be way too small to see anyway. However, you could experiment with this and see if you could make it big enough to overpower the normal flare.

Experience tells me that the normal star flare is most likely a sprite, which is scaled according to the star size provided in the map file. This being the case, you should be able to locate the sprite graphic in the resources somewhere. Although any color change you make would be global, unfortunately. However, if you did get the lensflare option for the star light to show up large enough, you could potentially replace the normal flare graphic with a blank graphic and use the star light's flare instead. Be aware though, that this will require more work from the video card than the sprite does. Not much, just more.

(If you don't use Lightwave, I could send you a copy of one of the EoC systems with the star's lens flare options activated if you want. Then you could just edit the flare size as you need.)

mailto:second_chance@cox.net
The Ultimate Guide To Modding: I-War 2 - Edge Of Chaos (on hold during SW MP mod)
cartoons.sev.com.au/index.php?catid=4
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20 years 1 month ago #11720 by mdvalley
Well, there is a lens_flares.ftc and ftu in the images\sfx\ folder of the resource file. But I was tinkering with the flare just to see what affected it.

It’s the star itself I’d really love to make bigger. From what I can tell, the map file has no bearing on the star’s size and every star in the game has a 100,000km radius. I have a feeling it’s hardwired in POG somewhere.

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