Cloaking in S.O. and atmospheric missions

Shaggy

Shaggy

Vice Admiral
Is it possible to create custom ships that can cloak in Secret Ops? I ask because there is one fighter I want to build with a cloak.
Is it also possible to create atmospheric missions with the existing tools at hand for Secret Ops?
 
Heh, we were arguing about cloaked ships in WCP/SO time in the general forum - I don't think that cloaks in the Vision engine were implemented, hence the cutting of the inflight cloaking comms.
 
Me and Quarto done sone experiences in that way, wich involved animated textures and mission editing, though it wasnt perfect, was actually usable. Though it will work only for the player, not the AI, since it notice the ship, 'cloacked' or not.
Atmospheric missions cant be done with the engine :(
 
I was thinking about something like that - cloaking ships could have textures which fade out and the wireframe disappearing. Of course, I didn't think about the lack of impact on enemy AI (which, of course, is natural since the Nephilim can detect cloaked ships).

How did WC3/4 implement cloaked ships, and why can't it be done with WCP/SO?

WC2 was easy - just flicker the sprites before letting them disappear. But Jazz and Stingray are also on your wing when you encounter Strakha - you don't see them shooting at flying shadows. :)
 
The AI was 'told' to ignore cloacked fighters, like they dont are there...sure the game knows it was there, it was just ordered to ignore it, and it also was removed from your radar, so you couldnt locate it.
Now in WCP, this was planned (this and much more: quasars, nebulas, black-holes, leech guns, multiplayer and so on), but it was so rushed into release that it was abandoned. :(
 
How are cutscenes handled in SO. Are they just video files triggered at a specific time, like an AVI or MOV or whatever. Or do they work differently?
 
Umm... SO cutscenes are game engine generated - hence they're pre-written scripts which move ships around in a certain way.
 
Fun topic :). To add to what KW said, it may in fact be possible to have something even closer to proper cloaking, because it is possible to order the AI to ignore a particular ship. However, even in this case, there would still be a lot of problems.

If the player is the cloaking ship -
1. Guns work while cloaked = bad, because the player is virtually invulnerable.
2. Capships would probably continue blasting away = bad? Maybe not so bad, depending on your point of view.
3. No way to activate/disactivate it. Cloaking works for the duration of the entire mission.

If the enemy is the cloaker:
1. Radar signal remains. The enemy ship remains targettable. It is possible to program the ship to change alignment during cloaking (so that the automatic targetting automatically switches to a different, hostile ship), but this only works if the player has automatic targetting switched on, and even then can be worked around simply by unlocking the target.
2. You can prevent the cloaked ship from being shot at, and from shooting - but if you do the latter, you will also prevent it from taking advantage of its cloaking system. The only manoeuvring it will do while cloaked is to avoid collision.

As for cutscenes, they are nothing more than perfectly ordinary missions, just much more customised to obtain specific results every time.

Finally, atmospheric missions. Strictly speaking, there's no reason why one shouldn't use a 'landscape' mesh in SO, which, combined with a sky-like background would create the illusion of an atmospheric mission. However, it is difficult to say how SO would handle what would have to be a bloody complex mesh.
 
Originally posted by Quarto
Finally, atmospheric missions. Strictly speaking, there's no reason why one shouldn't use a 'landscape' mesh in SO, which, combined with a sky-like background would create the illusion of an atmospheric mission. However, it is difficult to say how SO would handle what would have to be a bloody complex mesh.
Click to expand...

Even if you use a 'landscape' mesh like you mentioned, this cant be infinite, i mean it will have its start and ending, and not stretch all around the place like planetary missions.
What could be made is a large 'asteroid' in capship style format, with 0 speed and the building complexes like capship components...maybe like the shootable tower components? With a few turret around the 'complexes'.
Hmmm...this could be interesting ;)
 
KW, I'm not sure if the WC3/4 landscapes were infinite either... probably not :). An asteroid mesh would work too, though, except that this obviously limits us to, uh, big asteroids. No planetary missions as such. Still, nothing wrong with a few moon-attack missions, eh? ;)
 
Like, say, a battle station the size of a small moon and featuring a giant superlaser capable of destroying an entire pla... uh, never mind...
 
Well the plan I had was to create an episodic WC game for SO, ala Unknown Enemy, and I have plans for one fighter designated a light Recon fighter which I was hoping to have it cloakable. There were also going to be a couple of cloakable fighters on the otherside as well. I also wanted to have some ground attack missions, some fighters are capable of atmospheric flight while others aren't.
Well seeing as how I'm still working up the back story and the fighter designs I can probably tweak things around a bit, and perhaps try a few of the tricks listed here, before I kick into full production on it.
 
My advice would be to try to limit such stuff to the absolute minimum. You definitely should try to make each mission as original and unique as possible, but there are some things which are simply too labour-intensive to bother with...
 
Well in the next couple of days I'm going to start playing around with the mission editor, get familiar with it. I'm going to do a some practice runs, both editing missions and ships, before I really get down and dirty with the rest of Mod.:cool:
 
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