[Snail]

Damn, those look good.

[General Battuta]

You also need to put the modular tables required to make the effects work in /mediavps/tables.

[blowfish]

Of course

DDS and EFF in effects
TBM in tables

[Rodo]

time to add some smoke to freespace!!

completely agreed with you here, it looks bad for a ship to explode and leave no single trace of it's existence rather than some loose big piles of junk floating around.

Would be also nice to see some actual debris coming out as well to finish the job, like a bunch of small asteroids remaining in the place the ship explodes.

[General Battuta]

High Max, I solved that error by making sure the tables were all complete and correctly formatted and ensuring that exp10 had an .eff file - you can edit those with TextEdit.

[Herra Tohtori]

Personally I would like to make explosions of ships more rare. Capital ships changing to dead space hulks when the atmosphere and other vital systems are compromised would be much more awesome.

A campaign where capital ships would be considered destroyed when they are debilitated enough to not be able to do anything (propulsion disabled, weapons disabled, life support disabled, atmosphere compromised, power systems destroyed) would be more realistic. They would only be obliterated by continued beam or bomb barrage, otherwise they would just sort of die and the hulk would continue to exist. Evacuation would be started at the point when hull or critical systems integrity reaches zero, and it would take a lot more damage to completely destroy the dead ship.

I have always thought that the capital ships in space sims would deserve to be a lot more durable.

But these explosions are excellent, and in my opinion would be very well suited for explosions going on at the surface of a ship as it's integrity hits zero, it's lights flicker out and it starts to just drift as it's being evacuated. Good work.

[blowfish]

TextEdit.

Or Notepad in his case.

[General Battuta]

Yep. I'm actually on Windows too - just a slip of the fingertongues.

[Nighteyes]

time to add some smoke to freespace!!

completely agreed with you here, it looks bad for a ship to explode and leave no single trace of it's existence rather than some loose big piles of junk floating around.

Would be also nice to see some actual debris coming out as well to finish the job, like a bunch of small asteroids remaining in the place the ship explodes.

You know, thats possible... I can add to the main explosions animation smoke, but for it to look good the animation will need to be around 600 frames
the best thing would be to code some sort of particle spawn, similar to flashy deaths, only to activate a second or so after the explosion starts, and assigning that effect a smoke animation...
about adding debris and small chunks to the actual explosion... thats a bad idea, it will look very 2D, I tried adding smoke trails to one explosion, and it also turned out very 2Dish...
I also believe cap ships should be a lot more durable... but fighting for half an hour, only to get a massage telling you you killed it, and not seeing it explode is very unsatisfactory 

[General Battuta]

Check the .eff file for the first explosion he posted (expo06? expo08?) Use that as a model. That's what I did.

[Herra Tohtori]

Make sure that it's not saved as file.eff.txt.

Notepad++ is good for all text editing.

[Rodo]

about adding debris and small chunks to the actual explosion... thats a bad idea, it will look very 2D, I tried adding smoke trails to one explosion, and it also turned out very 2Dish...

not talking about the explotion itself, I mean like actual pieces of junk floating around... like the ones the game already generates, but smaller and with 0 speed, floating in a cloud of dust right in the place the ship exploded... for reference check any of the homeworld series, you'll recognize about what I'm talking right away.

I also believe cap ships should be a lot more durable... but fighting for half an hour, only to get a massage telling you you killed it, and not seeing it explode is very unsatisfactory 

for this case the explotion would occur and in other way a little more complex and certainly more beautiful and credible...

would be like a big flash on a central part of the model... folowed up by a chain of similar flashes but smaller which will be surging from the center of the big flash to the periferia of the model, this small flashes would folow particular path depending of the model of the ship destroyed...so you can place the smaller flashes over the "less shielded" parts of the hull... like a chain of explotions surging from the core reactor and spreding in the insides of the ships hull.

then the remaining thing would be a burned piece of junk, just like that special trunk which leaves the hulk of the ship (IIRC from wanderer).

there you go... a good good looking explotion ehh?

been thinking about it a lot, but it's too complicated, too big and requires both coding and modeling and I will certainly not finish it myself all alone... I just lack the time and experience for it  

[High Max]

-

[General Battuta]

No, exp10 is still a text document. You need to turn on the Windows option that lets you edit file extensions manually and change .txt to .eff.

Also, these frame counts are still enormous! I get texture corruption in Blue Planet every time I'm using more than one of the explosions at a time. While they're beautiful in their current form, I don't think they could work in the MVPs.

[Herra Tohtori]

It's the option "Hide known file extensions" in folder settings if I recall correctly.

You can also do it with the command line. Renaming the file, I mean.

[High Max]

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[High Max]

=

[Nighteyes]

I just tested the explosions in Surrender Belasarius and they look great. A good way to increase replay value and make Freespace not get old.

Try flying through flake smoke 
I'm sure I posted all my *.eff files with the effects...
about exp10, I don't like it anymore and it was a WIP, and as you can see with the normal stuff I upload its very easy, just drop in effects folder, sorry for the headache
I don't know whats blue planet's problem, 150 frames for a major effect in the game is not big at all! I've been studding these things, and from what I see a LOT of effects frames go on stupid effects such as differant laser hits, shields and such, most aren't even noticeable...
I bet Blue Planet uses allot of these effects, thus creating the texture corruption...
If I would need to choose, I'd rather see these effects in and take out\use the same effect for some laser hits, I honestly think they push the game's visuals a few points up...
and, FSO as I downloaded it has no problems at all with them 

[General Battuta]

150 frames isn't bad, you're right. I believe I was thinking of your older, higher-frame effects as causing texture corruption.

[Nighteyes]

Hi everyone! here is a new Flak explosion probably the last effect ill upload for a while... lots of cool stuff to do for Earth Defence mod
Get it here:
http://files.filefront.com/Flak+exprar/;13786689;/fileinfo.html
As usual, just extract the RAR into the mediavp\data\effects folder and enjoy the fireworks 

and for all you lazy people who can't be bothered doing that, here is a video showing you what your missing 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38RbFimz25g