[Vasudan Admiral]

That twin expansion thing is the exact problem I was trying to explain from the start in this thread. It's also the reason the shockwaves were much to fast when they were first released and needed table modifications to slow them down.

And by 'texture', the sort of thing I was refering to was a....shockwavy-energy-rippling square effect - making it tilable over the whole shockwave geometries' surface. Not the expanding ring effect currently used.

[CaptJosh]

I just wonder...I know it's not that realistic, but in Shadows of Lylat, they should have a spherical explosion model just like in Starfox 64. I wonder if something like that can be used.

[Wanderer]

Now that we talking about 3d shockwaves... would it be possible to get the 3d shockwaves to always appear within certain limited viewing angles.. Say 3d shockwaves would be drawn at a randomly determined angle within (for example) 30 degree angle from the normal of the plane of the shockwave. So that the rather bad looking gaping sides or flat plates (depending on the shockwave model used) would be avoided?

For example in some missions even the retail version shows currently better shockwaves than the SCP version as in those cases the shockwaves are viewed from the side so that with 3D shockwaves the textured sides are almost in 90 degrees angle from the viewing point and are very hard to notice.

[Vasudan Admiral]

That's the issue we're trying to figure out how to eliminate rather than avoid - the current 3d shockwaves are effectively 2d shockwaves acting like a 3d shockwave would, which is why we often see them at the nasty 90° angles.
A truely 3d shockwave effect would be visible from all angles and still look good. (Incidentally, Strat's right in that shockwaves in space would be spheres, meaning the 2d shockwave that always faces you is closest to reality, but I'm a fan of the current expanding doughnut shape - much bigger cool factor there. )

[DaBrain]

Yeah, but we need blooming or glowing shaders for this... otherwise 'real' 3d effects looks very plain.

[taylor]

Personally I greatly prefer, and only use, DaBrain's 2D shockwave (the blue one) and don't really like the 3D versions at all.  I don't want to get into a debate on personal taste though.  I do want to touch on one thing that I'm not sure too many people are fully realizing...

The general idea when texturing a ship model is to use as few textures as possible on it.  I think everyone gets that at this point.  But the thing is that a 3D shockwave is a model too, only in this case you aren't using 1 texture, or even 10 textures, but 160 of them.  For a ship that uses animated textures, each frame of that animation is also a texture, so you have to add them all into the texture usage.  They may not all be rendering at the same time (for the same frame render of one model at least), but they do still all have to be loaded at the same time.  I'm simplifying the analogy a bit, but the basic idea is the same.

I don't think it's fully possible to have really good looking 3D shockwaves at this point in time.  We could do more with it, perhaps expanding on the idea of the new secondary weapon transparency effect, to make a shockwave have settable alpha setting at the start and end of it's run.  Model transparency should mostly get rid of the seams, and mixing that with cycling texture transparency could give an enhanced visual effect without having to use new animation frames to do the same thing.  Perhaps this would allow a better looking spherical shockwave and maybe even reduce the number of required animation frames.