Weapon depthing - neat weapon layering trick

Darlos9D · Post by **Darlos9D** » Wed Jan 28, 2009 1:16 pm

So, something I always found kinda odd about BF is that all the weapons seem to be set on top of the ships. Well, now you can hit the W key while a weapon is selected to make the weapon sit right on top of its parent section, in regards to layering.

So here's a neat trick to make weapons look like they're sticking out of the sides of sections: Make a section big enough to cover most of the gun except for the end or tip of it. Then, make a child section that is smaller than that section, and obscure it underneath the first section. Then, add a weapon to the obscured section, hitting W to put it at the same layer. Now just move the gun around until it sticks out of the top layer the way you want.

I made a screen shot that shows the result on a ship I made:

Maybe this idea was immediately obvious to a lot of you. I dunno. But just in case it wasn't, I thought I'd post it.

CmdrTimo · Post by **CmdrTimo** » Wed Jan 28, 2009 1:53 pm

I've done something similar to this before, maybe useful for other first time ship builders.

Offtopic:Are you the same Darlos the modder for DarkStrom?

Burg Hammer Achtzehn · Wed Jan 28, 2009 5:51 pm

CmdrTimo wrote:Offtopic:Are you the same Darlos the modder for DarkStrom?

Same name, same quote in the signature; there's a pretty good chance.

Either way, this is a good tip. Thanks Darlos.

Skull13 · Post by **Skull13** » Thu Jan 29, 2009 2:05 am

It IS the maker of [blatant advertandsellout]Darkstorm Enterprise for Cortex Command![/blatant advertandsellout]

Wow.

Darlos9D · Post by **Darlos9D** » Thu Jan 29, 2009 5:11 am

Uh... yeah, thats me. I am indeed Darlos9D of the Cortex Command community. I didn't think that my reputation would precede me here.

Hopefully you'll see more of me around here. With this new release, I'm tempted to make a ballistics-based fleet. And I'll attempt to make it a balanced fleet, since I'm not too big on enormous capital ships. As far as the visuals goes, I'm thinking of making them all look like rather blocky hunks of metal. Should be fun.

I don't want to do any penis-waggling though. Judge me by my merits, folks! I work hard for approval.

So back on topic: are there any currently posted examples of ships that layer weapons under other sections? It'd be neat to see examples.

Skull13 · Post by **Skull13** » Thu Jan 29, 2009 7:28 am

Um... No. The new version literally just came out the day before yesterday. We do have a transforming mech, though.

Post by **Arcalane** » Thu Jan 29, 2009 8:17 am

People are working on it for the mini-fleet project, heh. I'll try and dig up screenshots that were posted in our IRC channel later. I thought I'd be the only person around here who would recognize your name.

AidanAdv · Post by **AidanAdv** » Thu Jan 29, 2009 8:37 am

Darlos9D wrote:So back on topic: are there any currently posted examples of ships that layer weapons under other sections? It'd be neat to see examples.

I have a few ships that use weapons depth:

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/152727/Ship_ ... 0drone.png

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/152727/Ship_ ... rigate.png

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/152727/The_S ... _Grief.png

Darlos9D · Post by **Darlos9D** » Thu Jan 29, 2009 10:07 am

Neato. It definitely gives a more three-dimensional look.

I go make ships now.

EDIT: OH GOD THE BEE... uh, BUGS. My ship crashes the game. Boo hoo...

Draco18s · Post by **Draco18s** » Thu Jan 29, 2009 11:51 am

Until we get a good animated screenshot exporter, you'll have to live with this.

The four sections on the right "rotate" around each other.

Course, it looks terrible once they start getting destroyed.

Post by **Arcalane** » Thu Jan 29, 2009 1:01 pm

It's called Shift-F9 + The GIMP.

Learn to use it, it's handy.

The Fat Sand Rat · Post by **The Fat Sand Rat** » Fri Jan 30, 2009 8:19 am

Ohai there Darlos.
Interesting method. Might this be coupled with rotating sections in order to achieve a cover on weapons when they're not firing?
Someone better than me should try it out.

D00D! · Post by **D00D!** » Fri Jan 30, 2009 9:00 am

Ideally triggers would work better than rotating sections but as of now, the bugs are too crippling so we just have to stick to rotating sections.

Darlos9D · Post by **Darlos9D** » Fri Jan 30, 2009 11:32 am

The Fat Sand Rat wrote:Ohai there Darlos.
Interesting method. Might this be coupled with rotating sections in order to achieve a cover on weapons when they're not firing?
Someone better than me should try it out.

Oh god they're following me.

But yeah, I was thinking of something like that myself. Though rather than rotating I was thinking sliding. So you could have some "arm" slide out, or have a part of the ship open up to reveal a weapon before firing it. This would look pretty sweet. I'd like to do it with some kind of missile launcher ship.

But as D00D says, the bugs are crippling. I can hardly load up normal ships half the time. Sigh...

Draco18s · Post by **Draco18s** » Fri Jan 30, 2009 3:26 pm

Arcalane wrote:It's called Shift-F9 + The GIMP.

Learn to use it, it's handy.

Shift-F9 you say? Hmm... I hadn't seen that listed anywhere, but then there are a large number of hotkeys and no search function on the manual. The last animation I did I had to compile one screenshot at a time (and hit F9 for every one of them).

Ok, the shift-F9 isn't intuitive, it didn't give me any indication that it was ready for input and the area it captured had one corner at my mouse location prior to hitting the command, as opposed to F9's selector. Took me 3 tries to figure it out.

I apologize, it turned into a 1 MB gif image. There were 50 frames, and I did scale it to 50%. Should have frame-skipped, I guess.

View it here.