Re: Effects showroom!

Why485

New snazzy lens flare and engine trail!

Reverse thrust!

This was more of a physics experiment than an effects one, but it has some new effects. I think this is a good example of how effects are more than just fancy ALE editing. It’s about working very well with everything around it to create a seamless and polished experience. See the video for more info.

View it on the actual Youtube page for HD.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R40-ghf3Ws

@Myself from Youtube:

After getting sucked into Nexus: The Jupiter Incident for awhile I started to wonder if the Nexus style of ship handling can be adapted into Freelancer. Freelancer capital ships tend to lack a feeling of weight. Nexus did a terrific job of presenting this for its large ships and well, learn from the best right?

This video isn’t terribly interesting to watch, no explosions or anything. It is just a Bretonian (Liberty is overdone) Battleship undocking, doing a short circuit, then docking again. The point is to demonstrate the way the capitals handle, which is a near direct translation of the handling of capitals in Nexus.

I don’t know if anything will come of this, it was really just a fun experiment to make capitals feel heavy. Like you are carrying that weight around. This was little project was based on 88 Flak’s RC131.

? Offline

Like the reverse thruster concept, bit bright for my taste but the capship movement looked spot on.

Wolfie

Damnit Why! You always make everyone elses work look like its vert very easy.

Well, tbh I love how Nexus handles ship movement, and I must say you pretty much hit the nail there. Good work!

rsabatino

thats really cool i like it

TheDvDMan

Awsome work Why! BTW how does the reverse thrust work?

Why485

There’s nothing special or groundbreaking about what I did. The physics are just a slight modification of 88 Flak’s current battleship handling.

The ship carries more weight when turning, meaning it can’t change directions as instantaneously as before. Actual turn rate is unchanged. The ship also takes some time to reach maximum speed in either direction.

The reverse thruster is nothing special. It’s just a regular thruster that points backwards. The only interesting thing I had to do with the thruster was a quick EXE hack courtesy of adoxa so that the thruster sound plays when you set the thrust to a negative value.

Why485

Here is the actual engine effects used in the video. They’re pretty specific purpose, but they are here if anyone wants to use them directly or as base code for something else.

I also haven’t tested it, but I get the feeling that it won’t work properly in multiplayer. As far as I’m aware, the state of a player’s engine does not get sent to the server or other players. Meaning to a player observing another player’s engine, the engine will always be at idle. In this case of this effect, idle looking like the engine is completely turned off.

The settings I used in the engine_equip file were these:

flame_effect = gf_br_largeengine03
trail_effect = gf_br_smallengine03_trail
trail_effect_player = gf_br_smallengine03_trail

http://www.mediafire.com/?f2i1f4alscwbnhv

robocop

So, what do you do there? Forward motion is done by the engines, reverse motion by the thrusters? In other words, no forward motion assist by thrusters?…
That’s so simple yet so ingenious…

Gisteron

i recognised the effect disappears, when you shut down the engines. is that managed by the effect? how?

Why485

robocop wrote:
So, what do you do there? Forward motion is done by the engines, reverse motion by the thrusters? In other words, no forward motion assist by thrusters?…
That’s so simple yet so ingenious…

Yeah that’s pretty much it. That and some modifications to the battleship handling to make it feel like you’re really throwing weight around when you move it. Those thrusters have to work to move the ship.

Gisteron wrote:
i recognised the effect disappears, when you shut down the engines. is that managed by the effect? how?

That’s done in the ALE. Vanilla effects do the exact same thing, they just don’t completely shut off when you throttle down to 0.

I don’t entirely understand what’s going on here, but this is how I made what I did work.

Emitter_Frequency = {
Flag = 4

Entry = 0.0000000000000000, 0.0000000000000000
EFlag = 0
SubFlag = 1
SubEntry = 0.0000000000000000, 0.0000000000000000, 0.0000000000000000, 0.0000000000000000

Entry = 0.0000000000000000, 6.0000000000000000
EFlag = 0
SubFlag = 1
SubEntry = 0.0000000000000000, 0.0000000000000000, 0.0000000000000000, 0.0000000000000000

Entry = 0.0000000000000000, 100.0000000000000000
EFlag = 0
SubFlag = 1
SubEntry = 0.0000000000000000, 50.0000000000000000, 0.0000000000000000, 0.0000000000000000
}

Of interest is the three Entry lines. At least in the context of an engine, they set points on a graph of how much the frequency should be at a certain throttle position.

For example, at 6% throttle, the emitter emits at a frequency of 0.

Entry = 0.0000000000000000, 6.0000000000000000
EFlag = 0
SubFlag = 1
SubEntry = 0.0000000000000000, 0.0000000000000000, 0.0000000000000000, 0.0000000000000000

Likewise, in this snippet, it tells the emitter to emit at a frequency of 50 when at 100% throttle. The Freelancer engine does a simple linear interpolation between these values. Think of it as plotting a graph using these given points.

Entry = 0.0000000000000000, 100.0000000000000000
EFlag = 0
SubFlag = 1
SubEntry = 0.0000000000000000, 50.0000000000000000, 0.0000000000000000, 0.0000000000000000

Gisteron

as we are on it: the frequency, is it particles per second or how are they calculated?

FriendlyFire

Particles per second, randomly generated.

Sushi

FriendlyFire’s new boomtastic effect

Gisteron

now some wreckage and the death is perfect

Wolfie

WUT!? O.o

Huor

looks good - someone needs some sunglasses while watching it 8-)

Ice.man

Hi mates,

This is a question aimed at Why485 but hoping anyone maybe able to give the answer. Im currently trying to recreate the reverse thruster effect shown in a previous post and come up with a problem. With the engine powered up (not killed) everything works fine, the ship goes forward with the engine and reverse when thrusting. The problem I found was when the engine is killed, the thruster works as normal ie. it powers the ship forward. Is this a known problem ? Any advice would be appreciated.

Ice

robocop

I think what you need to do is go into the cmp for the ship and flip the hardpoint that you’re using 180 degrees. I wish I could remember which axis that is, those always confused me…

Gisteron

yea the axises in the hardcmp on the rotation are entirely wrongly written in the program layout. the first one is z and not x, the second is x and not y and the last is y but not z (while we agree that y is, like in physics, the up-down axis and z is the back-front one).

Why485

Ice.man wrote:
Hi mates,

This is a question aimed at Why485 but hoping anyone maybe able to give the answer. Im currently trying to recreate the reverse thruster effect shown in a previous post and come up with a problem. With the engine powered up (not killed) everything works fine, the ship goes forward with the engine and reverse when thrusting. The problem I found was when the engine is killed, the thruster works as normal ie. it powers the ship forward. Is this a known problem ? Any advice would be appreciated.

Ice

I’ll be honest and just say that doing such a thing never occurred to me. In making the reverse thruster thing, I never killed the engine and tried to fire a thruster with negative thrust.

Thrusters with a reverse thrust may very well do just that with how they were coded into Freelancer. Short of a hex edit, I don’t think anything can be done about that if it happens entirely as you describe.

To prevent that from ever being an issue I suppose you could disable engine kill… I was never really a fan of it, and Itano Circus actually does just that. In IC it messed up the flow of things so the player just isn’t allowed to engine kill. (Disabled the key for it.) I’m not sure how practical a solution that is for your mod though, as it is a global change.