Been looking around, but can't seem to find anything on this in the forums or on the wiki: I'm wondering if there are any ways to control the nature of those glowy fiery trails that spawn from damage impacts on ship hulls.
When you shoot something, you'll see the telltale glowy things right away, and they can be quite bright and dense, even for small impacts. I've even seen them appear from very soft collisions rather than direct laser shots, which looks a bit silly sometimes.
I think it'd be useful to have control over their density, duration, and ideally even display range. The latter would be especially useful in nebular missions. I've seen cases where a surprise encounter was spoiled ahead of time since you could see the damage particles aglow in the fog, well before you were supposed to know a ship was present (no sensor lock or even narrative hints). If they just didn't come into view until you were within X meters, that would probably help mask the presence of derelict ships in a nebula, for instance.
I get the biggest FPS spikes when I am in a heated dogfight at point-blank range, hammering the **** out of something with rapid-fire weapons and spawning dozens of particle emitters all over the target's hull. Sometimes this alone is enough to make performance choke a bit, which then makes it hard to stay on the target. Being able to cap the number that spawn per ship, or globally, would help cut down on performance drain when blasting away at something right in front of you.
To the soft collision issue, one solution might be to have a particle emitter spawn probability based on the damage dealt (though I imagine something like this already exists since not all collisions generate them), maybe with a minimum damage threshold. Even if the actual damage taken by the target is negligible or zero, the attempted damage would be a good way to calculate the odds. Hell, even the actual damage might be good -- if you have an invulnerable ship, you probably wouldn't expect to see any fire coming out of it, right?
It might also be interesting to have different types of damage effects, such as quick jets of gray/white gases (like internal air leaking out briefly before seals kick in, or rapidly-evaporating liquids due to the sudden pressure gradient) for lighter hits. I imagine the idea behind the burning effects is to represent combusting oxygen venting to space and igniting from the weapon impact / heat of the resulting fire. But not all parts of a ship are going to have combustible gases to leak in the first place, so different kinds of spew would look pretty cool.
So are there .ini controls or whatnot I've missed that don't disable them outright, or is that something currently hardcoded? Thanks guys!
