Well, once again milo has proven he bends to the community, spec maps was not even slated for starshatter, he was thinking of it for starshatter 2
Milo is so the man.
So, milo, here is the list of things I've made up over the last month or so of things I though of that could be added or fixed, kind of a lot, but hey, some of it might be good lol.
Missions
Ability to add pictures to messages
Play certain music on certain events(ie certain track when a ship blows up)
Ability to include an entire wing as an event, ie event is only true if the whole wing is destroyed
Enhanced mission editor to prevent dropping out to edit the txt files
Functions
Real manual firing, think freelancer, you could go into an external view, scroll around, and where ever you pointed the mouse any weapons in that arc would fire.. thats what starshatter needs for manual firing. That way, even if you cant lock on you can still point the guns in that direction and fire(and I need it for the minbari lol)
Ability to turn off collision detection for objects,in fact the abilty to turn them totaly off for the ai, this will enable some funky nebulas and other things.
Ability to override milos defaut ships and galaxy(sorry milo lol)<- not a priority until everything else becomes common(dynamic camps.. interface changes.. ect)
Limited access to the dat(or just examples so we can build from there), specifically anything to do with awards, explosions, hud/interface, and dynamic campaigns, even if it means learning everything on our own.
Skin support
Ability to add gravity to objects.. So they will pull you towards them
Ability to add light objects that will changed the background light based on seconds and/or distance to them(ie hyperspace flashing)
Ability to add more then one star to a starsystem
Graphics
Done Spec Map Support(way to go milo!)
Bump Map Support(Should be noted that unless this can be combined with spec and lum maps its usless except for planets... perhaps making specs and lums worth together would be much more important)
Animated Texture Support
Surface scarring, for example, when a ship gets hit.. A black scar appears there.. And stays for a time we specify, same with fire.
Dynamic planet mesh changes, so there are no blocky spheres up close
Addition of spec and bump maps to the planets
Flair effects on the atmosphere to create a planet look
Here is more about planets.. I think this screen says its all, its from the freespace2 b5 project
From what I can tell of the pic the planet is made up of a basic diffuse map(sstarshatter supports)
The ocean effect is a specular map(ss supports just not for planets yet, that I know of)
After staring at the coulds for a long time I have to think they are actually bump maps under diffuse maps.. I think the same for the land areas also, it makes sence I do that in max.
As for the "flair" around the atmosphere, I dunno how that is done, I know -how- to do it in max, but not what effect its called.
Finally, this points out the problem ss has with close planets, I dont know why but if you get even resonbly close the textures get all blurred up, you can see the polygons making up the spheres.. it just does not look good...
I will try to find more about how this was done
Later!
