Question about sendToBack and bringToFront…

Mon Aug 01, 2016 5:03 am

I see these used on a number of ships in their thrust effects, typically with a value of "*" to make the effect always be painted either behind or in front of the object creating the effect. There are a couple of ships that use a list of comma separated numbers instead, notably the Oromo and Manticore, presumably to change the thrust effect paint layer for either specific frames or a range of frames. How exactly does one use this to specify frames to change effect painting to either back or front?

Mon Aug 01, 2016 12:27 pm

If the ship points down (more than 180 degrees), exhaust is automatically sent to back. If the ship points up (up to 180 degrees), exhaust is automatically brought to front. Putting frame numbers into sendToBack and bringToFront will override default behavior for those frames.

Mon Aug 01, 2016 1:17 pm

Only individual frames, huh? No way to specify a range? That’s gonna suck. -.- (Also it means that the ships I saw that specify it have off-by-~~one~~two errors on the second half of the rotation. I’ll ticket that.)

Mon Aug 01, 2016 3:53 pm

Not sure about range. I delved into this stuff back when playerships had forty frames and exhausts were sprites instead of particle jets.

shanejfilomena · Mon Aug 01, 2016 7:57 pm

Apologies if I am not as advanced as you great minds ( I just fly the ship )

However : you might want to look into the .xml for Midst of Dragons
( after you see such ships as the Oromo fly in the Intro screen)

I think my positioning of effects is along the lines of what you are talking about.

I appreciate all the great code work of you advanced minded pilots -
but I like to keep things short and simple due to the fact it's harder to break.

The " Hit Box " of the new versions of ships is smaller then the images...but it was always a bit smaller I think.....so basically I pushed some weapons and effects beyond the Hit Box to run closer to the image boarder...

http://xelerus.de/index.php?s=mod&id=1532