Hack Request - Lods and Star Spines in Nebula Zones
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Hi! I was working on some things to do with fields, but I’ve run into some problems getting them to work properly.
The first problem is with a nebula. It’s a different type of nebula though, because the fog and inside clouds have been removed, leaving only the outer wisps - as intended. The problem is the objects inside the field vanish from a certain distance. Planets, such as the one in the screenshot, disappear at 35k. Stations and other objects have different ranges in nebulas, and I’ve found depot tanks appear before the station parts they are attatched to. Adjusting the LoDs in the ini only increases the visible range of the objects slightly, but the problem of them disappearing at certain ranges remains.
From what I can tell, there’s a line of code somewhere that defines the LoD ranges for nebulas seperately, similar to the normal one that increases the distance at which objects in empty regions can be seen.
Here’s a picture of a planet inside the “nebula” visible at 34.9k, and invisible at 35k.
http://oi52.tinypic.com/qrm7fr.jpg
http://oi54.tinypic.com/30hy5vr.jpgThe other problem is with sun rays, or “spines” as they’re called in stararch.ini. Is there a way to stop them vanishing when entering asteroid fields and/or nebulae? I’m pretty sure Plasmafire found a way around this, but this doesn’t seem to be defined in an ini file.
http://oi54.tinypic.com/152i8pg.jpg
http://oi56.tinypic.com/35co6xt.jpgThere might be ways that don’t involve hacks, but from what I can tell I’m almost certain that hacks are the only way to get around these problems.
Any help would be appreciated. I also understand that finding the hacks is very difficult, but I can’t find alternatives.
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I second Xalrok’s problem and his request (the first one I mean, about the Nebulae. I don’t use Star Spines and even have a little script removing all of them - though I think I will change this coz they look kinda cool anyway, though they are also lame from a physical point of view)
This problem doesn’t seem too different from the problem of planets disappearing in normal space beyond a certain distance (what was it, 130K or so?). In fact, it is identical. Except for the limit, which is much shorter (35K, according to Xalrok)
I am no hacker at all, but I guess this one shouldn’t be too difficult for those who have this ability. (I could go searching for occurances of 35 or 35000 in the .exe, but I don’t think it’s that simple)
It would be very cool it this is solved. We could have misty, cloudy star systems, without an all-obscuring nebula.
NB all these limits are there for a reason: to keep the efforts for the computer’s processor within a certain limit. Most of us will have better computers since the original game, so I don’t think expanding this limits will generate huge problems, but I felt compelled to write a few words of caution
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This problem doesn’t seem too different from the problem of planets disappearing in normal space beyond a certain distance (what was it, 130K or so?). In fact, it is identical. Except for the limit, which is much shorter (35K, according to Xalrok)
I am no hacker at all, but I guess this one shouldn’t be too difficult for those who have this ability. (I could go searching for occurances of 35 or 35000 in the .exe, but I don’t think it’s that simple)
I don’t think it would be that easy, since it seems to be different for different objects. Planets disappear at 35k. The ku07_sun disappears at 39k, while the red_giant_sun doesn’t seem to show up at all from outside the nebula, only appearing when you enter the field.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that anything inside a fogless nebula won’t appear at all from the outside until you remove the [Clouds] entry. Like this from Ku07_Nampo_cloud.ini:
[Clouds]
max_distance = 300
puff_count = 10
puff_radius = 100
puff_colora = 0, 150, 200
puff_colorb = 0, 255, 200
puff_max_alpha = 0.500000
puff_shape = crow_cloud1
puff_shape = crow_cloud2
puff_shape = crow_cloud3
puff_shape = crow_cloud4
puff_weights = 1, 1, 1, 1
puff_drift = 1.000000
near_fade_distance = 125, 200
lightning_intensity = 1.000000
lightning_color = 65, 25, 85
lightning_gap = 20.000000
lightning_duration = 0.500000Which means that the only way to have a fogless nebula with a misty effect would be to have a nebula smothering an entire system. From what I’ve found (which is actually where I first encountered this) the 35k and 39k lod problems occur, even though you’re still inside the nebula.
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Have you tried a fog setting that starts and ends very far away?
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Yes, thats what I meant.
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Xalrok wrote:
If you mean this:[Fog]
fog_enabled = 1
near = 500000
distance = 500000
color = 0, 0, 0Then definately. At this level the fog is gone, leaving only the exterior and interior cloud wisps.
I tried with fog_enabled set to 0 or even leaving the line out. Didn’t seem to make a difference. Although I did a bunch of tests on the wrong nebula and was kinda pissed off I had to do it again, so for acurate and confimred test results - do it yourself
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Xalrok wrote:
Which means that the only way to have a fogless nebula with a misty effect would be to have a nebula smothering an entire system. From what I’ve found (which is actually where I first encountered this) the 35k and 39k lod problems occur, even though you’re still inside the nebula.
I recently noticed that a solar asteroid (meaning: a single asteroid setup in the System’s ini file rather than thru a asteroid field) also remains unseen until the player is very cloes, at about 3.5K or so. much cloed than a planet
(Btw this was a custom asteroid, enlarged by 2.5 with the FL Model Tool which is aimed at .cmp files while the asteroid is a .3db file - didn’t test it yet outside of the nebula so I can’t say this is a fault of the asteroid. Btw the LOD ranges in SolarArch were set much farther so shouldn’t be the problem.)
Indeed the fact that various solars have different visibilty limits, makes it hard for the layman to search for a hack (Iirc, the planet-visibilty hack in normal, open systems, was found by someone who just searched for 130,000, found an occurance, altered it and found that it worked!!! An inspired guess that we can’t hope to repeat in this case.)
Yet, the fogless Nebula is really cool: you can create a misty system with it, so I hope one day the issues mentioned will be resolved.
Reason enough to bump Xalrok’s request!
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Moonhead wrote:
Reason enough to bump Xalrok’s request!Heh, beat me to it!
I’m thinking that the nebula lods might be some kind of ratio, or at least a fraction, since the lod ranges for anything in a nebula is much smaller than the normal lod range for something outside it. Add to the fact you’ve got different objects having different levels of visibility (which they do outside a nebula anyway, just not usually as noticeable.)
I’ve also experimented with things like LODRanges = 0, 9999999 in solararch, but that didn’t really do much to help. I also don’t think it would work with stars, and since the red giant/Omicron Gamma suns don’t show up at all until you fly inside the field, I think another alternative is needed.
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Nebula’s are nasty suckers anyway. E.g. iirc, when two nebulas overlap, your ship becomes invisible when you fly in the overlapping zone!
So DA/MS probably put a lot of limits in it, to make sure the player’s CPU wouldn’t freak out.
I think your ‘ratio’ hypothesis makes sense. I hope it will allow for a relatively easy, single hack, instead of different hacks for each type of solar object.
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I’m going to turn this into a full hack request. I think this kind of nebula could be extremely useful in creating a new form of major scenery in a system, but the lod limit is a major downside, since it prevents both planets, suns and any kind of large object inside the field from appearing beyond a certain range.
I’m still interested in a hack that will not turn off star spines in asteroid fields and(or) nebulae as well, since I think that this is part of the reason why some stars don’t show up at all outside of a fogless nebula.
