Re: Effects showroom!

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IZHTPRUGXE

I don’t actually own Nexus, so I’m not sure why their ships explode in such a brilliant fashion, but I’m not going to complain.

I decided to try and replicate the fantastic explosions in Nexus for Freelancer. I tried to get as close as possible to it, including the scale. The scale is almost exact, meaning that even at 3km, the effect takes up a little more than your entire screen.

Minor note, the flaming and smoking trails are not a part of the effect and are an unrelated and separate effect played at the same time. I should’ve gone back and redid those while I was at it, but I figured I could save that for later.

That’s what i call an explosion…. for men

Truly breath taking!

Thats cool, Nexus has some of the coolest explosions in a game Ive ever seen. This would be a nice addition to FL.

Very nice, Why.

HeHeHe. The ALE wars have begun! Love it

I think that Explosion is a bit too huge.

Yeah this is a Explosion!!

Very nice Why on the expolsion effect and beam.

oooohhhhhhh pretty nice effects, will you get fox to add it into 88flak?? lol he is still tossing around a beta that can add it in before release. grins

I posted that up way late in the night and was in sort of a rush, so here’s some more info and status and stuff. FAQ go!

Big!

Yeah, the effect is stupidly big. My first goal was to get what Nexus has, and that includes scale. Then afterwards I could adapt it to make it more Freelancer friendly. The full scale effect will of course be available should you choose to use it.

Performance!

In terms of raw particle usage, it’s actually not bad at all. I’ve certainly done much worse I can tell you that. 95% of the particle count is in the sparkles that come out of the explosion and a little debris, and those are hardly expensive sprites to render.

The only thing that might cause issue is if you are right in the middle of it. I think. I’ve never had any performance issues whatsoever while working on this, but that’s not saying much because I have a very strong system in regards to Freelancer.

It doesn’t look right!

This is actually something I’m saying myself. I made this while running the Bloom 2 option in 88 Flak. If I turn it off, the effect looks significantly different. Before I release it, I need to do some tweaking to make it look okay without 88 Flak’s specific bloom features.

Before recoding it to look good minus Bloom 2 settings… wanna drop a copy in my PM box?? I use the B2 setting… & would really adore playing with this myself for a few hours… have plans to upgrade the vertical torps with such an explosion you see 8-)

Xarian_Prime wrote:
Before recoding it to look good minus Bloom 2 settings… wanna drop a copy in my PM box?? I use the B2 setting… & would really adore playing with this myself for a few hours… have plans to upgrade the vertical torps with such an explosion you see 8-)

That actually reminds me of an issue I encountered when working on this. Due to the way the fire works, if the emitter is moving as the effect plays, then the effect will not line up with itself. To counter this, I parented all the particles to the emitter. This is fine for when ships explode as the explosion would realistically move along the ships vector anyway.

The problem however is that when attached to missile type weapons, what will happen is that the explosion will start where the missile exploded, and then continue on the missiles velocity as if it had never collided. This is what causes those annoying clouds that fly straight through a ship when you score a missile hit in vanilla Freelancer.

The bottom line is, this effect (as currently implemented) cannot work as intended for a missile explosion. You either have the entire effect continue on the missile’s velocity pre-hit, or alternatively an effect that is misaligned.

That’s not to say the effect can’t be adapted. But I’m not sure how to do that yet, because I tried doing it last night but with no good results.

hehe, your the fx master i wont argue with ye… i can see the massive vertical explosion already tearing past the explosion zone going downwards as if it never went boom… yeah… not desired.

Looks awesome though Why, I’ve built a nice little shrine to you on my desktop with all your files & fx additions over the past year and a bit… I call it the “Whyshrine” this’ll make a great centerpiece when your finished with it

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Nice! looks youve pretty much nailed that effect. especially like the animation too and the way the ship turns about its own axis