Revive great thread!

One of Freelancer’s great conundrums is the lack of any proper beam weapon. I’ve never actually tried to make a beam weapon myself, so I decided to try it out today. I know a beam weapon cannot be done right, so I decided to see how close I could get making it look like it’s done right. Right now all I’ve got is a spiffy charging animation for the gun. It is very heavily based off of Freespace 2s beam weapons.

Before anyone gets too excited, much of this has no real practical application. It is mostly an effects exercise. In order for this to work properly, I’m actually using three separate guns.

This is all WIP, so it is subject to change.

The animation is what it looks like, the little dots in particular are what is called sucking in lines and is exactly what it sounds like. Freespace 2s beams did this, so mine do too.

Hey guys, how do you do all those fancy effects? WIth the ALE editor? How exactly? Can someone explain me please?

So bad that “ALE Editor” program is just exporter… it will be great to find a program which can edit ALE’s and show result without running a game…

Yeah that would be nice! It will make editing effects easier for everyone!
The problem is that making souch a tool will be a hard work, and souch a tool may even cost money.

Although the beam effect isn’t 100% finished, I think it’s close enough for my purposes.

Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLG1JywpP0I

Why, i dont know if i love you or hate you for that XD

Holy #$%%, that is amazing o_O

awesome work man

Do you fire the 3 guns at once? Or is it 1 for the charge, 1 for beam, 1 for end?

Is it a real beam or it is a pen named beam?

Here are all the source files, as well as details on how it works, and how to implement it.

The guns themselves can probably be tweaked a bit to produce a slightly better result. I stopped in the middle of such tweaking and decided that it was close enough.

I’m including a redundant mirror just in case.
http://www.filefront.com/17151413/FreelancerBeamFX.zip
http://www.mediafire.com/?s6fkhzfprn12m6c

Excerpt from the readme:

=======================
Intro

This was simply an effects modding exercise to see if I could recreate a beam similar in style to Freespace 2s beam effects. Unforuntely, beam weapons cannot be properly done in the Freelancer engine. The closest thing to a real implementation you can do is an extremely fast firing, high muzzle velocity, short lifespan bullet.

I had no intent for anything with a practical use, so I decided to see how close I could get to just looking like a working beam.

Rail-Knife Turret

Warning: I recall that modders said that weapons with an extremly high refire rate (iirc more than ~15) do costs A LOT OF performance.

Why485 wrote:
Although the beam effect isn’t 100% finished, I think it’s close enough for my purposes.

Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLG1JywpP0I

http://a.imageshack.us/img199/2599/beam01.jpg
http://img252.imageshack.us/img252/4586/beam02.jpg
http://a.imageshack.us/img820/9742/beam03.jpg

Try to move mouse while firing and it become a #^$%&.
It won’t be a beam while turning/targeting and firing.
A screenshot why:

It is not a ray.

FriendlyFire wrote:
Why’s done something really nice. If you think you can do better (hahaha), feel free to show us. Otherwise, be thankful he gave the source and that this is even possible.

Yes, this is very ok… if shoot in one direction
Anyway i saw nothing new for me - just very fast bullets - there is no hard work. Its wrong way to make real ray. We should attract patience to programming (hacks, plugins) to enable graphic engine to do a ray (kion lasers in X2/X3R/X3TC is not a fast bullets).

I know it’s not the same thing, but could you possibly simulate something similar by using an extremely long beam length? i.e slow refire rate but long lasting effect lifetime. Totally useless against fighters I suspect but might not look unfeasable when fired between slower moving capships.

Wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t already been there and done that though.

There are two ways to do beams. There is the super fast gun method, and then there is the muzzle flash method. There are pros and cons to each.

The super fast gun method is the one everybody is familiar with. You simply use an extremely fast firing gun with a super fast bullet. The muzzle flash method on the other hand involves attaching the effect to the muzzle flash of the gun.

Super Fast Gun Method

Pros:

• Beam collides properly with objects
• “What you see is what you get” hit detection

Cons:

• Throws in insane amount of bullets in an insanely short time, prone to causing and being affected by lag issues.
• Due to long beamfx for the bullet, at short range you may end up with no visual effect at all.
• Sweeping a beam results in banding. (The issue described by Nova.)

Muzzle Flash Method

Pros:

• Solid, coherent beam
• Does not require an enormous amount of bullets
• Immune to banding when sweeping a beam
• Beam can penetrate targets

Cons:

• Because your bullets are invisible, it is possible that your beam hits a fast moving target, but the actual bullet did not.
• The beam will always extend to its full length, regardless of whether or not something is in the way.

In the end, I decided to go with a hybrid of the two. The majority of the beam is composed of the fast gun bullets, but a muzzle flash beam consists of about the first 500-1000m of the beam.

[Edit] Just saw Timmy’s post.

While visually, that would probably work fairly well as long as you use a trail based effect for your bullet, the beams would not be continuous. You would not be able to sweep beams and the beams would just do one single lump of damage.

If you have ever played Mechwarrior 3, what you are describing is a regular laser, while the beams that people typically try to replicate are pulse lasers.

[Double Edit] Just saw Nova’s new post.

Nova wrote:
Its wrong way to make real ray. We should attract patience to programming (hacks, plugins) to enable graphic engine to do a ray (kion lasers in X2/X3R/X3TC is not a fast bullets).

It’s funny you mention that. I’m 90% certain that the kyon lasers in the X series function exactly like how a muzzle flash laser would work in Freelancer. The X series honestly seems like it’s using the same engine as the original X:BTF, and they’ve just been adding graphics and functionality as they go along. If you’ve ever tried modding the game (not scripting), you will see how painful it is to do nearly anything due to the abundance of hard coded nonsense. The end result is a game that while visually very pretty, still feels extremely clunky and dated.

(Another example of the above rant would be ARMA 2. The reason ARMA 2 feels so clunky and slow is because they’ve been using the same engine since the original OPF.)

This reminds me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9ULlOE5VUE&hd=1#t=0m16s

The only mod I’ve ever seen a good beam working in was that old plasmafire mod, the transports used to fire a nice red beam that appeared to work correctly. Be damned if I can find a download of it anywhere to take a look at how it was setup though. If anyone has it archived somewhere might be worth taking a peak at how they did it.

Yours looks a lot more spectacular WHY but if it’s a lag fest in the making I can imagine that would be a problem for most. Bloody good effort though