[General Battuta]

I actually know what happened, but I just want to keep some attention on their sad absence!

Starfield streaks - these were cool, but I have no idea how the hell to implement them now that we all use skyboxes for everything, mostly I am just saying this because they were cool, forget about it

Beam whack - baby oh baby do I miss this. What happened to our beautiful beam whack? Did Goob ever implement his proposed medium between SCP's totally neutered beam whack and retail's wildly unpredictable coordinate dependent beam whack?

[BritishShivans]

What was beam whack again?

[Nuke]

i think this may have something to do with moi generation in pcs2 being different from old skool ships and stock assets. in the very early days we didnt have any way to change moi except using a hex editor. it would just be an identity matrix causing a case of the 'spins out of control when the pilot sneezes' syndrome. that was followed by a period where moi was exposed for modding, but most moders either fudged it or copied data from an existing asset. then pcs (not sure if it was pcs1 or 2) came along with a moi generator based on collision detection and maths (which may or may not be how volition calculated their moi data). so i figure we went with the physically correct method and v may have just fudged the data based on rule of cool. thats my theory anyway.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

I was getting whacked pretty good by Ultra AAA beams doing some testing the other day so beam whack is still there.

[Fury]

- If you want starfield streaks, you need to add a number of stars in fred background editor. Usually these won't play together well with skyboxes, because stars are placed in random positions. I believe the only way to replicate this sort of behavior would be to create a post processing shader that only applies to skyboxes. But I don't know if that is technically possible. The E and Zacam would be the experts in shaders.
- Beam whack is determined by mass in its weapons.tbl entry as well as ship's mass in pof. To get same whack as in retail, you need to use same mass value as AAAf or AAAh uses. Only the Ultra and weak shivan AAA has different mass values IIRC. The AAAf/h mass value is hardcoded to certain amount of whack to retain same whack as in retail. Any other number than that and you need to experiment what value works for you.

[General Battuta]

I know how to get starfield streaks - it's just that like you said they don't play well with skyboxes.

[Kopachris]

I always hated starfield streaks.  Made me dizzy.

[The E]

Star streaks are a poor man's motion blur, basically. I suppose we could implement a full-on motion blur (which, to be honest, would probably be easier than introducing workarounds to make star streaks play nice with skyboxes.

I wouldn't work on such an effect though, as I find motion blur to be really bad.

[General Battuta]

Yeah I don't miss it enough to give a ****, as I think the first post made clear. Beam whack is of much more interest

[Dragon]

When PP was being implemented, motion blur was added at some point. IIRC, they couldn't get it to look right, so it was removed.

[Nuke]

i remember $nd: tags. those were the days.

[Mongoose]

I miss the starfield streaks myself, and I'd be all for figuring out a way to implement motion blur, since I think it can add a really cool element of immersion if it's pulled off right.  I'd imagine it'd take quite a lot of doing, though.

And that's right, I remember Goober discovering that the retail beam whack was entirely dependent on where you were in the mission, which is one of those "only in FS2" coding moments.

[Fury]

I always disable motion blur in games if possible. It annoys the hell out of me.

[MatthTheGeek]

This thread is know known as "who likes or hates motion blur/starfield streaks".

[Dragon]

Well, the only other point was beam whack, which is supposedly still in (though I made an AAA beam with 10 mass and it didn't had a noticeable kick...).

[Goober5000]

Beam whack is alive and well.  Just assign your beam a mass other than 100.0 and you can make it as wild or as tame as you like.

[redsniper]

I didn't realize I missed the beam whack until Battuta pointed out it was gone (or reduced? or whatever).

[MatthTheGeek]

I seem to remember the retail intensity of beam whack was actually the result of an unintended bug in the code, which was since fixed, but like Fury, Goober and others pointed out, the engine is still perfectly able of doing it.

[General Battuta]

I seem to remember the retail intensity of beam whack was actually the result of an unintended bug in the code, which was since fixed, but like Fury, Goober and others pointed out, the engine is still perfectly able of doing it.

Yeah, it was dependent on your position in the coordinate system, so it was sometimes larger and sometimes smaller than it is in SCP right now.

[Colonol Dekker]

I miss being able to hold Keypad Ins (0) and being able to look around in cockpit view. Why'd it get removed?