Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: Erebus Alpha on December 01, 2016, 11:52:22 pm
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Has anyone attempted to use some sort of particle spew for afterburners, instead of afterburner trails? If so, how would one go about implementing this? I have made some cool visual effects for weapons using .eff files and particle spew, and now I'm curious about doing it to spaceships.
If this has never been done before...how difficult would it be to do?
EDIT:
I got this working, it was much more straightforward than I imagined. However, there are some minor issues that I am trying to troubleshoot. (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=92854.msg1835799#msg1835799)
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Hmm, I'm pretty sure I've seen this somewhere before, probably in Wings of Dawn, so I'd say this is very much possible.
Have looked into the ships table options on the wiki to see if there was anything relating to it ?
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Have looked into the ships table options on the wiki
Is this what you're referring to? (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Ships.tbl#Customized_Thruster_Effects)
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I recall seeing a .tbl for that in a WIP mod I happen to have... might be an offshoot of scripting.tbl...
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Have looked into the ships table options on the wiki
Is this what you're referring to? (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Ships.tbl#Customized_Thruster_Effects)
Possibly :nervous:... I don't know how the effect is achieved, but I seem to recall seeing some fighters with sparkly afterburners (probably in Spoon's Wings of Dawn).
Maybe it's done through lua scripting and there's an AB particle spew script somewhere, maybe it's done through tables, I don't know.
But I do think it's been done before.
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InfR1U uses this frequently. I cannot find any single script file assigned to this so I guess it was implemented directly into engine long time ago. We're using it via modular -shp table.
Here is sample table entry:
$Name: GTF Mihos
+nocreate
$Thruster Particles:
$Thruster Particle Bitmap: TerrEng
$Min Radius: 0.3
$Max Radius: 0.35
$Min Created: 1
$Max Created: 3
$Variance: 0.001
$Thruster Particles:
$Afterburner Particle Bitmap: ehit-red
$Min Radius: 0.4
$Max Radius: 0.70
$Min Created: 2
$Max Created: 3
$Variance: 0.0001
Make a new modular ship table and change GTF Mihos to your desired class, change effects and check it out.
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I cannot find any single script file assigned to this so I guess it was implemented directly into engine long time ago.
Not that you can write a script to add new table entries; if you tried it, you'd just get parsing errors for your ship table when it encountered unknown symbols.
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I tried it out on the Mara - it's very cool! However, I did notice a couple of issues:
Strangely, when zooming out, it seems that the particles disappear. It's as if they have a minimum draw distance. Is it possible to raise that minimum draw distance without a severe performance hit? Or does FSO crash if it tries to draw a half-million particles?
Also, when executing sharp turns, the particles seem to periodically disappear.
For troubleshooting purposes, I am using a .eff, composed of 20 corresponding .dds files. I don't know if that has an impact, but this issue does not exist for weapon projectile particle spews.