[SKYNET-011]

Could beams be made to use a model?

Don't hurt me!

[Fry_Day]

How would you propose to do that?

What kind of model? What will you do once you have one model?

[LtNarol]

to this i ask: to what gain?  They certainly could be changed, and it'd be quite easy at that, but how would it help anything?  You need the same explosions and glows to cover up the ends, and you have to figure out how to add fancy effects.  It'd probably look worse in the end.

[SKYNET-011]

True...

Ah forget it.

[diamondgeezer]

Well... you could put an animated texture on it...

[RangerKarl]

Two words: Macross Cannon.

[Bobboau]

actualy this could probly be done without that much difuculty, most of the code needed was made for the warp model, so a beam model could be scaled and varying types of glow points could be made...
actualy now that I think of it it might be a bit harder than that...

[Liberator]

While it would serve no practial purpose, SvK over on the Relic Boards made some 3D beams for HW that were pretty slick.:thepimp:

Anybody else notice the nearly overwhelming propensity to compare Freespace to Homeworld?

[Killfrenzy]

It's the beams. They dominate all.

[LtNarol]

wouldn't animated tiles with beam tiling (something we already have) be better?

[Krom]

You want a beam that has width and depth even when viewed directly along its lenght?  Meaning it doesnt look like what it is, a flat texture?

You could accomplish that by covering it with a lense flare when you are very close to the beam...  And it would be a cool effect too!

-Krom

[Fry_Day]

If you're talking about so far-fetched effects, how about this:
render the frame one time using the register combiners (Or pixel shaders) to reduce 1.0 from every color component (clamped, of course), so that only pixels with overbright values will appear, and copy the result to a texture. Blur that texture (the easiest way being letting the hardware create mipmaps and blending with them), and then redraw the scene, and add the blurred texture as a glare effect.
that way you have a general-case glare effect. Who wants to IMPLEMENT that?

[IceFire]

Originally posted by Fry_Day
If you're talking about so far-fetched effects, how about this:
render the frame one time using the register combiners (Or pixel shaders) to reduce 1.0 from every color component (clamped, of course), so that only pixels with overbright values will appear, and copy the result to a texture. Blur that texture (the easiest way being letting the hardware create mipmaps and blending with them), and then redraw the scene, and add the blurred texture as a glare effect.
that way you have a general-case glare effect. Who wants to IMPLEMENT that?

I nominate Fry_Day

[SKYNET-011]

I also nominate Fry_Day.

[Fry_Day]

D'oh, I thought of a problem in my scheme, which makes in much less useful. Since the substraction is done for every pixel when it's drawn, the only way to achieve overbright values is multitexturing, since normal adds will simply add 0 to each framebuffer value (since they are between 0..1.0). So right now, the only way to achieve glares is glow-maps in OpenGL (Since, AFAIK, the Dx glowmaps aren't done with multitexturing).
The solutions to this problem are either to wait till every effect uses multitexturing, or use a floating-point framebuffer

[##UnknownPlayer##]

Wait wait wait....back up here: Why would we do this? There are next to no times that a beam is ever going to be pointing directly at the screen enough for us to see that its just a 2D texture.

On the other hand though, I do like the idea of beams having glows along there length - but with beam tiling that can be done by tiling with a bitmap with an alpha component (we do support alpha in beam tiles right?)

[Fozzy]

The shape could be a cone (triangular pyramid) with the point emitting from the end of the turret and on the large end of thier could be a smaller cone so thier are no flat ends.

textures could move away from the model thats fireing the beam, and the exsisting beam textures could be used to cover up any disapearing faces (like the thrusters) in the semi seathrough model.

[Fry_Day]

How about a simple, implementable way to give an illusion of depth for a beam. I'd say spawn particles in a certain radius from the center of the beam that run along its length. everyone likes glowy bits

[SKYNET-011]

I got the idea from one of Shrike's ships.

[beatspete]

seems a bit pointless, beams may be flat, but so is a cylender if you look at it from the side - its a rectangle.
Animated textures, like DG said, would be more intresting.