Thinking of quadrupling the size of the imagemod..

[Ed Kolis]

... by writing a Povray script to create pictures for all the weapons from MOO2 with every possible permutation of mounts, by creating simple parts like "laser_barrel" and applying various transformations and adding extra pieces depending on the mounts applied! (So a heavy laser would be bigger while an autofire laser would have coolant tubes attached.)

Wonder how long those would take to render...

And would it only quadruple the size of the imagemod, or even more??? Let's see... MOO2 has 8 beam mounts and 4 missile mounts, I think... so that would be 2^8 * number of beams plus 2^4 * number of missiles... I know there are only 7 missiles (counting torpedoes) but I never bothered to count the beams... those could take a while!

(Yes, I know that some combinations are not allowed, like Heavy Point-defense Shield-piercing Ion Pulse Cannons - real MOOniacs can see four illegal combinations there - but why not have images for them? They might be used for something other than a MOO2 mod, and it makes the creation of the components entries file easier if they're all laid out neat and proper )

[Atrocities]

Oh My God! Man that would be sweet, but at this point why bother? Oh right, because what can be done should be done.

I have about 25 new components for the image mod, but have not used them yet. I was going to use them with this latest version of the STM, but there was no chance in hell that SJ could possibly get them into the IM before the end of the month, so I opted to wait until a later release.

I guess we could never have enough components and such.

[Fyron]

Umm... why was there no chance that SJ could get them in the image mod before the end of the month?

[Caduceus]

I think SJ found "Sopwith" again, and the last we saw, he was cursing the red baron as he flew off into a cloudbank.

[Suicide Junkie]

That's a bit too peaceful of a scene...

Think continuous, 3vs3 swarming dogfights, with bullets, bombs, and aircraft parts flying everywhere.

[David E. Gervais]

Why? Why do this for se4? Well, quite frankly any new components drawn for se4 can most certainly be used in se5 by hungry modders.

But the best reason for doing it is because you'll have fun doing it and you'll get the satisfaction of adding even more to this fine community.

Nuf said, Cheers!

[Ed Kolis]

OK... task #1... Learn how to do Povray scripting again, since I forgot so long ago, and never really figured out the important stuff like loops

I mean, I could create a scene in Moray or KPovModeler and render it, but I'd still have to do the looping stuff to piece the parts together and resize them... and neither Moray nor KPovModeler seems to support conditionals and looping very well - so I might as well learn the scripting language anyway

I wish Povray were object-oriented, though... then I could do something like this:

#declare ball = sphere
{
// ball attributes go here
}

ball ball1, ball2, ball3
ball1.translate<1,0,0>
ball2.scale<10,10,10>
ball3.pigment = color {rgb<0,1,0>}

[boran_blok]

Oh noes the bandwidth, but ehm, go ahead, at least use .rar compression, with all the similar image info the savings over zip would be immense.

[Ed Kolis]

Heh, don't worry, I'll probably never get anywhere with this anyway... it was just a dumb idea I was throwing out there

[Ed Kolis]

OK, I have all the existing MOO2 component images (they're in the imagemod, of course), but I can't for the life of me remember which is which... You think I should just go and make up my own based on what I think a laser cannon, etc. should look like?

edit: or maybe I'll just go do the Stars! components like I'd previously intended but stopped due to a bug in Art of Illusion regarding CSG