Stealth shipsets?
 

I wonder if this is a problem of general concern, or something that is only annoying to me. Do you ever have trouble seeing the ships from some shipsets on the system map? I do. Some of those ships are really -tiny-, and then when they use dim and dark colors, they are darn near invisible. Many times the only way I spot enemy ships is that the little triangle on the galaxy map alerts me that there are foreign ships in the system, so I search very very carefully until I find them. This doesn't do much good, however, when there are other foreign ships insystem that I already know about - then the triangle isn't much good as a warning device.

I'm not talking about ships that actually are stealthed or cloaked - those I wouldn't see at all. I mean the ships that I am supposedly able to see, but they are difficult for my eye to detect on the system map. Those are a real pain in the neck.

SpaceBadger

Re: Stealth shipsets?
 

People wanted ships that were sized.

Re: Stealth shipsets?
 

At least in SE:V, you should be able to zoom in somewhat to see those smaller ships.

Re: Stealth shipsets?
 

Of course, it would help now though if some of the smaller ships for certain sets were a bit more visible - it's usually those narrow ships that cause most of the problems. Despite that, I'd still opt for ships to be scaled, I'm anal about that sort of stuff...

...just ask Fyron, as I calculated potential lengths, widths, and even volumes for the planned ships in the Space Food Empires mod.

Re: Stealth shipsets?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">That's one of the main reasons I don't download other players' shipsets for PBW games.

The other main reason being I'm lazy.

Re: Stealth shipsets?
 

I too have these "semi-cloaked" ship problem sometimes. It is not a feature of scaled shipsets, but of some specific shipsets using certain colors. If it is really annoying, it helps to replace the files of the offending shipsets with others containing more colorful and/or larger ships.

Re: Stealth shipsets?
 

Nah..
Except in a few obscure shipsets all ships are very visible.
Certainly all of stock shipets, even the darkest ones are very highly visible.

I don't know if this is your case SpaceBadger, and I don't know what shipset you're talking about, but I've seen too many time people complaining about things being too dark and having the problem magically solved by adjusting brightness on their monitors.
But well, sometimes monitors don't work properly, the user has somekind of visual handicap or the shipset is darn dark after all.

Then you need more complicated solutions such as editing the pictures of the involved shipset.

To correct too dark pics, most photo editors have a gamma correction filter or at least a brigtness & contrast one.
It's fairly easy to apply one of them to all pics in a shipset, and the change is small enough that it doesn't change the original "feel" of the pictures.

In extreme cases it may it can be necessary to add some subtle tint, and even add some reticle or somekind of highlight as a Last resort.

And about size, I agree there are too many shipsets where the mini_ships are too small.
There are too many shipsets where the ship called "dreadnought" and where present "baseship" looks smaller than most other shipsets' cruisers.
And in this group I must include some of the stock ones, some Atrocities' and even some of my own.
It's not so easy to correct this in an elegant way. If done carefully it may be possible to resize many of the picures, and still make it look good enough, but it's unavoidable that you'll loos some quality if the change needs to be too dramatic.

Re: Stealth shipsets?
 

Can you list a few of the sets that are hard to see? If any are mine I will try and lighten them up or make the ships a tad bit larger.

Re: Stealth shipsets?
 

It would help to have an option of always showing a flag beside the ships, as it does if it's over a wormhole or planet.

Re: Stealth shipsets?
 

I often had trouble seeing the Xitai and Praetorian shipsets. I improved visibility of the Xitai by increaseing the brightness level on my computer monitor. (It was necessicary to play Aliens vs Predator 2)

You can improve the visibility of any shipset on your install of SE4, just edit the shipset any way you choose: bigger, different color scheme, big white arrow pointing to ship, whatever.

Re: Stealth shipsets?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Yeah, that is what I would like to see. No need to alter the ship images, just throw a little flag out there to call attention to them.

One race I remember having trouble with was Praetorians. There were a couple others, but I don't recall which ones just now.

SpaceBadger

Re: Stealth shipsets?
 

Nice little trick is to reduce the contrast of the background starmap (the one in the Systems folder). Did this a long time ago when fighting against the Shadows. Never looked back since http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: Stealth shipsets?
 

I've edited a little some Xiati and Praetorian pics to improve visibility.
I have a few problems to upload it right now, but I may sent it by email iy you want them.

Edit: BTW Fyron, I get an error when I try to login with FTP into SE.net

[ November 11, 2003, 16:25: Message edited by: Andres ]