To spray or not to spray??

[SnakeMaster]

Does anyone actually the respray option on the HQ to personalise their battlefleets????....haven't done it myself yet, but think it would be a great way to seperate your fleet from the other races, tend to buy split ships so have ended up with 4 pythons and raptor, plus 40 Mamba Vanguard's and 20 Chimera's, great ships all of em, but i dont like that blo*dy orange you get em in........messed around with it earlier but you can't get the one i want, black!!.....just think of that a fleet of Black Python's.

[Graaf]

Set one of the parameter all the way down. Cant remember which.

And yes I painted my Elephant nice Blue

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

messed around with it earlier but you can't get the one i want, black!!.....just think of that a fleet of Black Python's.

Are you sure? Did you try turning the Saturation down to -256? I think that might have the effect you want, that is if the colour affects the entire hull of split ships.

[Woffin]

I think ive posted this before but here's a basic explanation of how the spray shop works...

[ external image ]

That bar represents the value "Hue" where 0 is the left of the bar and 360 is the right. Saturation just dictates how strong the colour is. For example if saturation was at the lowest value possible then there would be no colour present. If, however, the saturation was at full then the colour would be very very strong. Unfortunately, there is no way of getting black (or white) for your ships since they are secondary colours and a Hue bar can only incorporate primary colours.

Hope this helps

[Smacksim]

I think ive posted this before but here's a basic explanation of how the spray shop works...

[ external image ]

That bar represents the value "Hue" where 0 is the left of the bar and 360 is the right. Saturation just dictates how strong the colour is. For example if saturation was at the lowest value possible then there would be no colour present. If, however, the saturation was at full then the colour would be very very strong. Unfortunately, there is no way of getting black (or white) for your ships since they are secondary colours and a Hue bar can only incorporate primary colours.

Hope this helps

Except the last bit. Read up on Primary / Secondary Colors : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_color

But I'm just jealous, being an X2-0-phile.

[Space Ninja]

Ah thanks Woffin; I haven't even bothered with spraying yet because I didn't feel like playing pick a number; of course I'll still have to, but at least I'll have an idea what I'm doing.

[Aziraphale]

Someone should stick numbers to that colour chart, so it'd be easier to pick just the colour you want.

Someone with the necessary skills that is, which rules out me..

[jlehtone]

Saturation just dictates how strong the colour is. For example if saturation was at the lowest value possible then there would be no colour present.

How strong this added colour is. But ships have other paint as well. It is all over them. All we can do with the spray is to add (actually change) some colour to some parts of the ship, but even with max saturation you may see some of the unchanging base paint. So the result colour is a mix of the base paint and our spray.

I think I have about Hue 190, Sat -50 on Dragon and the result is bluish gray.

[SnakeMaster]

I have noticed on my travels around the universe that all military ships ( except the Boron's ) of all the races have saturation down max ie -256, of course this is mostly visable on the split ships ( especially M2 etc ) cause the area effected is around 90+% of the hull, and say all races border control ship's always have a purple scheme going,customes i think is blue, civillian ships ( taxis etc ) are green...etc etc......mmmmm still a shame you cant have Jet Black though.....now that would make a Python look evil.

[Fresshness]

I've tried to spray my raptor but I never see any results, can anyone help me a little?

I mostly max out the saturation.
I tried several hue settings, but I always end up with the same color.

also, when are you supposed to see the effect ? While still docked, or does it reveal only when undocked?

Sorry to hijack this thread a little, but I think the main answer to the thread has already being given and I thought starting a new one would be a little inappropriate seeing this thread is still on the first page.

Thank you

[SnakeMaster]

I've tried to spray my raptor but I never see any results, can anyone help me a little?

I mostly max out the saturation.
I tried several hue settings, but I always end up with the same color.

also, when are you supposed to see the effect ? While still docked, or does it reveal only when undocked?

You should see the effect straight away you should see the coulour change while you are still docked at the HQ, best way to see the effect is get in another ship fly away from the HQ then spin around so your facing your Python then go into the HQ settings and chage to you find one you like, the changes in hue are very dramatic if the saturation is at max, so dont understand why you are not seeing any effect?...i think i read somewhere that you need all the graphic setting on max etc. though....hope that helps.

[Fresshness]

You should see the effect straight away you should see the coulour change while you are still docked at the HQ, best way to see the effect is get in another ship fly away from the HQ then spin around so your facing your Python then go into the HQ settings and chage to you find one you like, the changes in hue are very dramatic if the saturation is at max, so dont understand why you are not seeing any effect?...i think i read somewhere that you need all the graphic setting on max etc. though....hope that helps.

Thank you for clearing things up !

I have all graphics settings on low, mainly because I only have 512mb ram (I made I stupid buyers-choice because 512mb extra ram would cost me at least 300 dollar - Rambus RIMM PC1066 )

[Deleted User]

Tricky thing this spray shop,
I thought I'd try and tie it down a bit,
but it's not very consistent.

The below sequence for a wing of a Harrier Vanguard has:
hue, saturation
000 -256
000 000
000 256
090 256
180 256
270 256

[ external image ]

So hue 0 would be blue, 90 magenta, 180 yellow, 270 green.
i.e.
[ external image ]
rather than Smacksim's colour order above

But then tried hue 0, sat 256 on a jaguar raider & couldn't make out
any difference to standard colours - maybe the normal split brown
masks it too much.

Also certain ships don't even show in the SprayShop list e.g Boron Octopus Sentinel, which is the one I wanted to test with.

And 'Reset to Default' gives fairly random hues at zero sat., which
doesn't give the original colour.

Bit confusing, might look a bit closer.

[DenYaSis]

Boron ships aren't sprayable.

I think it said it in the readme or in the thread for the Bala Gi missions. Can't remember which one I read it in.

I was a little bummed, as I think the Boron have the more aesthetically pleasing ships.

[jlehtone]

I think there may be race-specific variations. Maybe a base hue value added to the hue you set? Thus, each ship could have default hue of 0 and still have different race default. Not sure though, it was german thread ... (it probably is in their guides sticky)

Each spawned ship probably has randomly set hue in order to add variation. That was there already before 2.0. When was that Show Colour Variations checkbox added to graphics setup? And I bet that there is no second variable to hold a copy of the hue value. Thus, "Reset to Default" resets to race default and not to the original hue that the ship was spawned with.

[thetack]

i just wonder how mutch programing time was wasted on this usless gimic that could have been used improving the economy or fight ai or training the auto pilocs not to fly into asteroids.

[jlehtone]

Probably not terribly much for the 2.0. There is just the interface in the HQ menu to see and change the values. And the interface uses existing controls. More must have been used while adding the color layer on ships in the first place. But that must have been part of the "lets make good looking graphics and models" project.

[Deleted User]

i just wonder how mutch programing time was wasted on this usless gimic that could have been used improving the economy or fight ai or training the auto pilocs not to fly into asteroids.

It was almost 'free'.
Egosoft's DirectX shaders (except Boron ones, oh well) already have
g_Hue & g_Saturation parameters. The HQ spray shop values feed
(almost) directly into the shaders, so there were no extra textures
& presumably very little extra code required.


Shader g_Hue (0 to 360) = 360 - HQ_hue_value (for some reason I can't think of)
0 = default, values are constant across all races.

and

Shader g_Saturation (0.0 to 1.0 normally [0 to 100%]) = (HQ_saturation_value + 256) / 256
-256 -> 0.0
0 -> 1.0 (100% default)
256 -> 2.0 (200%)

Anyway,

The Hue value is a hue shift, not a explicit hue value.
So existing ship texture colours shift by the hue value, they are not set to the value.

The hue is 0 by default, increasing values shift existing colours up the hue chart (with wrap-round).
The saturation is 0 by default, -256 reduces the colours (darker), +256 enhances the colours (brighter).

If a ship's colour is white to black (ie some grey shade), the hue has no effect (no colour to shift).
This is why only some parts of some ships seem to change colour.
So there's little point in spraying the dark grey Hyperion (or any silvery/grey ship, apart from certain small bits).


For a Dragon the range of colours seems to be:
[ external image ]


Shame ES didn't allow saturation up to 512 [400%], cos this would be the only way to
get Red Dragons (with hue 0, which is the only spray job I wanted ),
[ external image ]

so I'll settle for 2nd best, Green Dragons
[ external image ]

click on thumbnail for 1152x854 image (161 Kbytes):
[ external image ]

Is it worth making a more extensive colour chart in some form, for various ships?
(cos the next version of 3DModelsViewer - which handles all this -
aint ready yet, mainly due to shader rendering difficulties)

[Nanook]

If a ship's colour is white to black (ie some grey shade), the hue has no effect (no colour to shift).
This is why only some parts of some ships seem to change colour.
So there's little point in spraying the dark grey Hyperion (or any silvery/grey ship, apart from certain small bits).

So, what affect, if any, does changing the saturation on a gray ship have? Can we change it to all black or all white? A black Hyperion would be pretty cool.

[SnakeMaster]

So, what affect, if any, does changing the saturation on a gray ship have? Can we change it to all black or all white? A black Hyperion would be pretty cool.

Depends on the ship, if its a Militery Python for eg which is gray... then changing the saturation would only bring colour to it, because the saturation is at -256...thats why its gray...its had all the colour bleached out to start with....but say the Hyperion take all the saturation out of it and it just effects the green strips down the centre...that section just goes gray.....Shame really.