Cockpit Transparency

[TARPSBird]

I added two of Martin Wright's RAF pilots to Paul Clawson's CFS2 B-18 Bolo, since the original plane had no crew. Got them positioned OK in the cockpit, but both crewmen alternately (or both) disappear and reappear behind the cockpit glass as I shift my view around the plane. This appears to be caused by the texture file used for the glass. Paul uses a .bmp file with a gray shade for the window panels in the nose, cockpit and gun turret. I've tried adding an alpha channel which allows me to lighten/darken the window glass, but the crew still blinks off and on. Does anybody know how to correct the disappearing cockpit crew?

[simonu]

Hi I have expirienced something similar,

I made crew for an aircraft in Gmax.
The crew are sometimes visible behind the canopy glass and sometimes they show through as if the glass was not there at all, it depends on the angle I view from.
I do not think this is caused by the texture of the glass.
I think it might be down to how the two models get drawn, it seems sometimes the sim cannot decide which is in front.
Remembering that the mechanism we are exploiting was intended for external payloads we cannot really say that this is a bug.
I'm sorry I cannot be more helpful, but I fear this might be one of the shortcomings of CFS2 that we must accept.

[Robert John]

This happens to me when the transparency is not a full 100% transparent.
I have read it is to do with draw order,I am still learning about this.
When I use double sided polys I still get this problem.
When I use GMAX Glass material every thing is ok.
This problem comes up alot with designers. There must be away around this.
Look at fsdeveloper on the web for more info.

[simonu]

Hi Robert I think the way round more technical
bare with me
The RAF pilot is a library object, it has a name and a GUID, the normal way to use him is via his name through the aircraft DP and the pilot object DP.
There is another way to call the pilot; by GUID directly from the aircraft model. This involves decompiling the aircraft model to a scasm asembler in order to insert the extra scasm commands that will call the pilot. The code will need to be inserted in the correct place in the code

[TARPSBird]

simonu,
What you described is exactly what my guys are doing. Now you see 'em, now you don't, depending on the look angle. I think I'm gonna have to live with it, since I know nothing about scasm commands or mdl decompiling. Or I'll try making the cockpit glass 100% transparent. I think I did that by accident last night and it worked. :d Thanks to you and Robert for the comments.