Vague Visual Request |
Submitted by Nevyn on Mon, 2007-02-05 01:25.
Space Empires V General
Could Sphere Worlds(and maybe ring worlds) be Translucent. Trying to find which hex a ship inside them is in is nigh on impossible.

Re: Vague Visual Request
Submitted by Thy Reaper on Tue, 2007-02-06 18:10.
Too bad that there's no way to only make it translucent when a ship is within its area...
Otherwise, that looks like a mod I'll want to get 
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Watch for my mod - codename: Dimensions - coming by Summer, 2007!

Re: Vague Visual Request
Submitted by ekolis on Tue, 2007-02-06 19:30.
OK, I just checked... looks like the opacity is overridden by having a texture bitmap specified
And using a PNG with transparency doesn't seem to work either... I wonder how you make .X models transparent then???





Re: Vague Visual Request
Not a bad idea! I think you can do it by editing their .x models! Though since I made planets big in 21st century mod (geez, I need to work on that thing!) that is a great idea which I ought to use - thanks!
All right, open up se5\models\sphereworld.x in a text editor, and (assuming it is actually a text file and not a binary xfile - I haven't checked yet) there should be something that looks a bit like this:
Material SomeMaterialName {
1.000000;1.000000;1.000000;1.000000;;
0.000000;
0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;;
0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;;
TextureFilename {
"SomeImageFileName.jpg";
}
}
See where there are four floating-point numbers in a row? Those are the RGBA values - red, green, blue, and alpha. The alpha is opacity, so to make the sphereworld translucent, just reduce it somewhat - start with 0.5 and adjust from there!
Hopefully this works, since I'm pretty sure you can have translucent ships in SE5... the planets ought to work the same way!
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Check out the 21st Century Mod!