Removing flashing lights from gates

[Joubarbe]

Hey,

Does anybody know how to do that? I'm talking about the lights that indicate that a ship is either incoming or outgoing. The big question would be: do I need to edit the models or is there a magic variable somewhere?

[XenonArchitect7]

I've done some investigation, and I don't know how those lights work. They are not a part of the actual gate object, so it leads me to believe that they are hard-coded to appear on gate locations. Or at least, they aren't implemented in the conventional way that most game objects are.

Here is the wireframe for LU's gate model. As you can see, it only contains the "bubble" and no lights.


And to my knowledge, the lights should have appeared in the scene file, objects\others\terraformer_gate_active_scene.bod, however the scene file only contains the bubble itself and nothing else. I know for a fact that blinking lights on ships are objects specified in the ship's scene file. But this gate has a very minimal scene:


This leads me to believe that it could possibly be some obscure thing with Animations.txt, Dummies.txt, Effects.txt, or one of those "types" files that I barely understand. Those files are not well documented and the objects defined in them are usually just a number or index rather than a name, so it's hard to decipher them. Perhaps someone else can shed more light on those blinking lights.

[Joubarbe]

Many things are obscure in the world of X3. Thanks, we'll wait for the answer of [RANDOM_NAME] (or I'll keep the bubble as it is).

[XenonArchitect7]

Well, for what it's worth...
I was looking through Effects.txt (in the Types directory) today for my own projects, and I came across the effect for the "lightning pulses" that appear at the center of LU's gates. It's the last entry (ID 900) of LU's Effects.txt. This isn't the position lights for the gates, but at least you can edit this to remove the lightning.


If you change the ID from 900 to something else like 901, it will break whatever is referencing it and your gates will be lightning-free.


The last thing I can think of is Animations.txt, which is another "Types" file. Some of the position light objects are defined in there, but I think they are the ones for ships and stations. Like the blinking light on the underside of a heavy centaur. You might want to mess with this file... For example, perhaps try replacing this file with a blank one or something. If the game still loads, see if the gates still have their lights. If so, then you know that they must be defined in Animations.txt and can therefore try to isolate the specific line entry that defines them. But I'm out of ideas after that.

[Joubarbe]

The gate "tumult" is, as you said, the lightning at the center of the gate and there doesn't seem to be anything else related to the gates in this file. Lightning looks good IMO.
Commented a single line in Animations crashes the game.

But that was a good try

[Zeron-mk7]

As far I remember correctly, that was long time ago , I was asked about that for X2 in Russian forum, these gate lights are defined into the EXE file, that means probably the same for X3 or defined into the game engine - in OBJ files.

[Joubarbe]

Ok, it's a no-go then.

[SirNukes]

I glanced through the obj and didn't notice anything related to lights in the gate code.

[Cycrow]

Its not in the OBJ files.
if its not in the model itself, then the most likely place would be in the Sector Engine (EXE)

[Killjaeden]

Commented a single line in Animations crashes the game.

if you remove lines from the file and load an existing savegame that has already been saved with the old file - it will crash. Same goes for dummies.txt and similar files. You can always add things, but never remove things (for an existing save). You could change the last file to be something else - maybe trick it into some null thing, idk.

The index of the file (number 900 at beginning) always has to match with the entries in it.

[N8M4R3]

I think there must be an existing file for the lights effect itself, has anyone had a look on the *.dds files? If not i'll take a look at them... there are only 2531 Maybe the file even could have another file type like *.bod but i'm not really sure. If we
would replace this light effect file through a empty file like killjaedon did at his "No-Ad-Sign-Mod" for example, that won't crash the game or occurs an error by loading a savegame, i think.

[N8M4R3]

I wasn't that wrong with my thought

here i have a light switch for the gates! Just copy this into your mod, if you like it!

and at the end...
the good news: they're really gone
now the bad: they're the same lights as used for docking. Only the orange light isn't used by the gates, if i saw that correctly. So hey we still have the undocking lights

[Joubarbe]

Thank you N8M4R3!

[Joubarbe]

Now... You wouldn't know how to increase the collision sphere of a gate by any chance?

[N8M4R3]

... You wouldn't know how to increase the collision sphere of a gate by any chance?

the "collision sphere" ... Do you mean the chance not to be hit by a incoming ship at the gates? If you mean this, I've heard that you can decrease the chance to be hit by increasing the gates model itself. But I've never tested that effect on my own, if that makes a difference. For my own i use a larger gate models from here: Ringless Gate Mod I think that would work for LU too and hope that the "gate tumult" would work correctly further in the middle after it. But if you try these delete the file "fx_gatewhirl.dds" in that cat before, to hold the blue LU spheres.

[Joubarbe]

Not exactly the collision sphere then, but the point of entry of the gate, where you have to go to start spawning. I have kept the green spheres from LU, but it would be good to be able to teleport as soon as you enter the sphere, and not just this tiny point at the center. I may use your solution though, thanks.

[N8M4R3]

Np, if you recognize any improvement through this mod it would be interesting if you would tell about it i remember if i send a ship to jump to a selected sector gate in Vanilla AP and jump after this through the same gate, i play billard with the 1st jumped ship or die through this collison. I'm sorry Unfortunately I do not know how to increase these entry point of a gate itsself. Otherwise i think we had to improve the jump command scripts, that a jumped ship is not parking in front of the gate and waiting for its punisher after a jump or you could let the jumped ship appear nearly to the gate, i think. Hasn't anyone adapted these scripts in this sense before?

where we are already with the command scripts, there are abbreviations at the ending of the names like "scriptname.std.pck/.xml" so there are ".std" ".pl" ".pre" ... did i forget one? Can someone tell me what these abbreviations stand for? I'm not so good at guessing english abbreviations. One could be standing for "preload" but ".pl" or ".pre" or both are for the same? and what the hell is ".std"? Sorry I dont know

[Joubarbe]

std is standard; it concerns all ships. pl as suffix is, in vanilla, "player". Generally it adds a few stuff before calling the standard script. Litcube used "PL" as preload, which are suffixed "pre" in vanilla.

Artificially delaying the arrival of a ship in a potential active sector must be avoided.

[N8M4R3]

now i finally know this things too, thank you for the enlightenment!

Artificially delaying the arrival of a ship in a potential active sector must be avoided.

Yes right that must be too if there are comming through the gates, maybe a kind of jump queue preload script with waits between the single jumps in a loop, or something like that. But the time which passes through the jumps is depending on ships acceleration, speed and its collision behavior if any object is in close. So its better to check if the gate area is free in some way to let the next ship jump. It is definitely a little more complicated as to let them jump to a point in front of the gate and let the collision behavior places the ships itself side by side. But clearly it looks better if they were comming through the gates in a sector. I haven't even looked at the jump scripts yet, maybe I should take a look to understand how a "jump to sector" command is working exactly at present and on which way it can be improved

Joubarbe you've done thousands and thousands of scripts for LU and Mayhem, can't believe that you have left the jump scripts totaly untouched

[Joubarbe]

There are no jump scripts. It's all hardcoded, and it takes a lot of tricks just to force the player to jump without breaking everything. And I'm not talking about continuing the tasks that have been interrupted. What would be doable however, is when a ship arrives, offsetting him a little bit to avoid the center of the gate, where the player always appear. But I think I've already tried that in the past, without success.