Hello, With the upcoming winter update, I'm back to poking around in the assets. I'm not too fond of any of the ship layouts (never have been!) so first things that's up will be replacing them with my own. However, I've noticed some new ship files, presumably for lighting; they are titled in a "[race]t[0-8]lit.png" fashion, and appear to be a little bit lighter coloured on the ship's hull—I just looked a little harder, and it turns out they're non-opaque, rather than lighter. Under the "[race]t[0-9].structure" files, the only notable difference is that they don't have the "fullbright" option set to true. Does anyone know what exactly these do? Are they used for regular lighting, or are they part of the FTL animations? They look easy enough to make, but I'm not sure why I'd be making them! Thanks to anyone who has time to look/answer! (Apex Tier 5 images attached for those who don't want to unpack.)
The whole lit is not new to just ships. All objects which produce light have them. From the object code the standard image is associated with full bright - with the lit is presumably not. Full bright being a developer \ user tool to take snap images and easier to see. It could also be a planned future optimization feature where the game would not have to calculate graduated lighting effects - improving theoretical performance on lower computers. Of course everything is just conjecture, but plausible none the less. The easiest solution is to Tweet Metadept or Omni or George and ask them directly. If they reply, feel free to share.
The 'lit' layers generally refer to images which are lit normally by the lighting system. They are often combined with 'fullbright' layers that are always drawn at their full values independent of lighting. This is to avoid the exterior of the ship being shadowed, and is also used in lighting objects to make the portions which emit light stand out from those that don't. Hope this answers your question!
Sounds like it makes sense! I'll have to play with it a bit. Do the transparent sections of the image simply serve to allow some of the fullbright layer to show through to the shaded layer, which is placed on top (as determined by the order in the code), or is the alpha layer being used directly in the lighting functions, to show a light source? Thanks for your help!
Yes, the transparency is used so that the final image is only partially handled by the lighting system and can't be darker than a certain threshold.
How do you make the "lit" version of the .png file? is there any way to alter the transparency of the normal ship.png automatically? i'm using GIMP for that. Thanks for suggestions!
You can just select the parts you want to be transparent, move them onto a new layer and change the opacity/transparency, and merge them back when you export as a png. It looked to me like it was about an 80% opacity, though I haven't checked the alpha levels yet. You should be able to do that with the eyedropper tool in Gimp; I haven't used the software in a while, so I don't remember how! You could create a script that would overly the block file to automatically select the correct parts of the image, but I doubt that would be worth it unless you are planning on making 100 ships.
thanks, i will try that! and no, i just want to change the hylotl ships, as the current blue ones are just .. not what i think hylotl shiips would look like
