Ship decals/logos

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pheonixstorm
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Ship decals/logos

Post by pheonixstorm »

Here is something I thought about awhile back but may or may not have brought up.. adding decals to ships or cargo containers with faction or company logos.

I know its not too difficult to do and probably would not require a huge change to the code (I think). Would be nice to see though. A random number of the cargo pods on the Ox could have some companies logo on them or even the logo of some shipping company (like you see with rail service such as Norfolk Southern and CSX).

We could also expand on this to (eventually) include player designed logos for their ships. This change might require a mask rather than blending.. I'm kinda fuzzy on the details atm (stupid cold has my head wrapped in a fog) but in any case SP would use whatever player.logo file in is data while in MP we could have soemthing more like playername.logo for each player. Each player would have to submit his or her own logo before inclusion into the game though for MP or no one else will be able to see that logo on any ships.
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klauss
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Re: Ship decals/logos

Post by klauss »

pheonixstorm wrote:Here is something I thought about awhile back but may or may not have brought up.. adding decals to ships or cargo containers with faction or company logos.

I know its not too difficult to do and probably would not require a huge change to the code (I think).
It would require no change to the code. VS already supports decals, although they're quad-based (not texture overlays). IIRC, factions define a decal image, and ships in units.csv define the placement.
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pheonixstorm
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Re: Ship decals/logos

Post by pheonixstorm »

How would that work for corporate logos on freighters or containers? Same thing or would that require a little more work? Or alternately if the container is a separate subunit could they be randomly swapped out as a new unit is spawned??
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Re: Ship decals/logos

Post by klauss »

pheonixstorm wrote:How would that work for corporate logos on freighters or containers? Same thing or would that require a little more work? Or alternately if the container is a separate subunit could they be randomly swapped out as a new unit is spawned??
I guess we could add some randomization.
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gonzo
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Re: Ship decals/logos

Post by gonzo »

klauss wrote:VS already supports decals, although they're quad-based (not texture overlays)
Does this mean they're slabbed on 'au naturel' and not part of the baking/bumpmap thing?
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Re: Ship decals/logos

Post by klauss »

Yep. Horrible. Very horrible.

Want another implementation?

You have an alternative: edit shaders to do the painting, and have an extra texture (say, texture5 or texture6, whatever, you can add arbitrary textures to the BFXM btw, and reference them on the .technique files) that is the logo. Then have alternative logos for the factions, and use the faction prefixing mechanism to make the engine use the right logo.

Done. You have nice decals.

:)

The hard part here, is making one decal that will work for all units. Not trivial. But, maybe, you could bind decal positions (the ugly VS decal positions) to shader parameters, and build something like that. Might work.
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Re: Ship decals/logos

Post by TBeholder »

Cleaning of packages and pre-configured ships means there's about to be procedural outfitting, right? So, we can give the ship a random part from a given list, right?
Why not do it the fun way? Make cargo pods into a set of subunits, much like skatecargo, and associate each with different decals and Cargo_Import settings, so that decals advertise contents? :)
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Re: Ship decals/logos

Post by DarkVixen »

I haven't dug deeply into the code to know if this is easy or not, but I wanted to say a few things that I really feel excited about on this topic:

I noticed that some starships, like the Watson and Schoroedinger have markings on them based on which faction they belong do and they change to reflect the correct faction.

Would it be possible to allow the user to put on their own markings in Ship Upgrades?

Such as cargo->Paint Job->Cool Flaming Stripes

Starships that do not have faction decals set will not have anything shown.
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Re: Ship decals/logos

Post by klauss »

I guess it should be doable. Feature request?
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