So how are we going to do this?
I've been thinking, Legacy has a dynamic system that gives the ship the same registry as the name of the ship.
I'm not quite sure how it works but maybe we could do something like that? Or would it be inconcievable considering the sheer amount of ships we'll have.

Or are we going to go with a popular registry? Or none at all. (this is why none of my ships have registries).

Thoughts?

If we include a changing registry system, how would it affect the other races? I'm sure they have registries of their own but i've never seen one. If we develop a system that gives ships different registries without requiring tons of textures, then we'll have to make sure it is worth the development time. Anyone know if this is possible in the first place though? How did Legacy do it?

*dons flame-retardant attire*

Do we really need ship registries? We could just leave them off .

i guess it's a modellers privilege to have such registries on the ships and I think for some reason, that level of detail would be very much appreciated by the hardcore trekkie .

You'd effectively have to create a different texture for each ship in combat, rather than sharing the same texture for several ships of the same class. That means a lot more video memory usage. I vote not to have them. Woohoo, I win .

Either that or have each ship store it's registry number, have a texture created and then plastered on it somehow, taking into account the differance meshes, lol good luck with that one.

Regards Wolfe

Which requires a different texture for each ship, or at least a different partial texture... either way it's impractical .

that can't be such difficult..I refuse to believe that! no seriously, why not create the usual texture saying "NCC - ", then leave out the rest, have the program write - with a certain race-specific font - the numbers directly onto the texture on certain predefined "hardpoints" after having loaded it into RAM and voilà the correct number should appear. That should even work with text though it's a bit more difficult since the length of the written text differs and an alignment issue arises, but not, when plastering over only different numbers. After that the program wraps the texture around the mesh in its usual way. Where's the fault in this calculation?

It's doable, I've been giving it some thought, how many ships require registries/names ? Only the feds?

I think every ship is somehow registered. It depends if there's any number on the texture though people have created for the different meshes of non-fed races. If our modellers didn't give it a thought and left the numbers out mostly, I guess then it's just either a simple number plastered somewhere onto the texture or Feds only .

Bloody hell! Please not every ship, how about just the main empires' ships, since the players can actually play those?

Well, I think I have a way of allowing the player to give their ships any registry/ship name they want. To do this we have to open up the models & add an extra piece of geometry at the spot where the registry/shipname should go, naming it "logo" or something (something for the engine to know where to substitute in a texture later). There might also be the need to photoshop out the original designations from the existing textures, so more work there. But anyway, with each ship, if the player gives it a different name and registry from the defaults, it is saved until 3D combat is activated.

When loading in the ships involved in the fight, dynamically create a texture file for each ship that has a non default registry/ship name, and on each texture paint with Empire-specific fonts the saved registry/ship name, then simply substitute the default texture on the "logo" geometry piece with the one that was just created, then proceed to actual gameplay with the loaded models.

The most headachey bit is how sometimes the Federation puts their registry / ship names along an arc, following the contours of their saucers, very tricky to get right, I would need to revise my trigonometry maths and then use that to put text along a curve something to do with the size of each letter, circumference of the circle, length of each arc degrees *brain explodes*

Do we really need this level of detail? I can plan for it, but probably won't put it in.

I doubt it's feasible to plant a texture over the model, I guess it's much better to actually overwrite the respective parts of the original texture with new numbers. I mean there are numbers on them right now. just cut them off manually, repair the texture (smooth it out), then let the program create random ones and lay them over the texture file merging the two layers and saving it png or more likely into RAM. Afterwards, the arc thing is done just like the original texture artist wanted it to.

Legacy uses a compromise between the two ideas, it uses the extra piece of geometry at the spot where the registry texture should go, but does not allow user to type in their own registries in game and dynamically change the texture that way, they have to be prepared externally first in photoshop and saved as a texture, game has to be restarted etc.

anyway, I think given the name length problem (you have to make restrictions there or use automatic font size reduction in case of smaller ships with long names) we should mark this as a to-be-done-after-completion thing .

I'd certainly like changing registries to be in, but if it's going to be a headache, then there are more important things to be done such as actually making the combat in the first place.

Something like this would scream "professionalism" though as Legacy is the only other game that does it. I think we should definitely plan to have it in, so that if someone happened to come along that knew of a way that it could be done easily, that we can implement their idea without having to rewrite the whole combat system. If that means leaving a gap somewhere in the code where the code can be hooked on then so be it.

I think it would be a good idea to have a "things to be done after completion" list though; potential updates or additions that people would like to have but are currently unfeasable. Actually i'll make a thread on it.

add this to the Things we all agree on list moe

btw. wasn't chessmess involved in legacy programming? maybe he knows by chance.

TWAAO died about two years ago when Jig deleted the old game development forum, Mal. Ok, the large bulk of it is saved in Dafedz's database, but a lot has changed since then...

I was bit of joking there but never mind

Lol ok Mal. But it goes to show, just how much I know about stuff here.

I made the New Thread if you have any other ideas that could go in there.

Over a year ago, I looked at something like this for ships other then Federation. My searchs found that other then Cardiassions, the other races in the TREK series carried no registeries on the outer hulls.

Romulans and Klingons carried thiers inside the ship, the Klingons in the engine room and the Roms on the command decks
(yes they have multipile command decks)

Ferengi I was not able to find anything, and the other races I did not look up.


So perhaps that can be a modd for the future.