[Antares]

A couple of things I was mulling over while considering bugfixes and the like.  I was thinking about whether or not that doofy bug had been fixed where a capship can fire its beam weapons during its last stages of destruction (leading to silly shots of beams being powered up and fired from disintegrating ships, or even empty space).  I'd -still- like to know the status on this, actually.

I got to thinking.  Would it be possible to plug something into the AI that would make "spinner" ships--fighters that fly off their axis when they're destroyed, instead of blowing up right away--randomly fire off some weapons as they're spinning around?  It would have no practical applications, but it would add a touch of depth to dogfighting... and I think it would be really cool to see a dying Mara go pchew pchew pchew before it blew.

On a related note, I thought I might make an attempt to resurrect the push for some flashier damage effects--things like fire and/or smoke venting from heavily-damaged craft.  This is purely eye-candy, with no weird damage modifiers or gradual deterioration... just something pretty to look at, for prettyness's sake.

This is partly inspired by 3DRealms' old combat sim, Terminal Velocity.  I always got a hoot out of taking shots at enemy fighters above the clouds... then following them while they spiraled toward the earth, guns firing and engines ablaze, and crashed into the ground.

[J3Vr6]

Well, I think the flashier damage effects are going to be worked on after 3.6, as Bobbou has been working on his damage decal project again.  I'm sure we'll see some pretty things after 3.6

In regards to beams being fired from a dying Cap:  What would be the difference in your argument of not wanting caps to fire, but fighters could, in their death throes?  I actually think it's pretty realistic that the ship continues to fire as it's being taken apart as power could still be going to that turret and the gunner could still be alive to fire off one or two final shots in a last-ditch effort to exact revenge on their death...

I like your idea of the fighter still firing as it spins out to its death, but I don't know how hard it would be to implement that or if it would break backwards compatibility.

[Antares]

It's not the idea of last-ditch shots that bothers me so much as the way in which the code currently executes it.  Seeing a beam fire when the turret isn't even there anymore isn't dramatic, it's just screwy.  If some kind of exception could be worked in, like locking beams once a ship begins to split into debris, then I wouldn't care, but when they fire once the ship is already in pieces, it looks silly.

The difference with fighters is that they're either whole or blown up, with no in-betweens, so there's no gray area to get muddled up in.

[Raptor]

The only flaw with that is that when a dying capship fires a beam, then splits apart, the beam glow point does not move with the turret.  I've even seen beams power up and fire when the turret model is no longer there. This was mainly on things like the Colossus though, with very long death times (I think the old release Gigas model, the one based on the Sathanas, took like 2-3 minutes to completely blow up:wtf: ).

I used to play Terminal Velocity.  Great game.  Too bad it won't play any more:(. I used to do that too, though I never remember seeing the fighters shooting randomly on their way down their doom.

[Hippo]

Aren't death-roll times directly related to the physical size of the model?

[Antares]

After wracking my brain a little, I think it might have been StarFox 64 that had the last-minute weapon discharges.  It's hard to remember.

[Shinobi]

Just use the turret-lock-all and the beam-lock-all sexps to fire when the ship dies. Simple, no?

[Carl]

Originally posted by Antares
Would it be possible to plug something into the AI that would make "spinner" ships--fighters that fly off their axis when they're destroyed, instead of blowing up right away

they already do that. just give it a fighter or bomber flag.

[Carl]

Originally posted by Antares
things like fire and/or smoke venting from heavily-damaged craft.

they already do that, too.

[Solatar]

Better looking smoke I think. It's good for now how it is though.

How did Freelancer do some of their graphics stuff? The smoke effects were excellent.

[Nico]

better bitmaps and that's it, I suppose.

[Bobboau]

they probly had a slight advantage in there rendering (real alpha blending) but if we were to implement that it would cause some major problems, I think better bitmaps is all we realy need
(real alpha blended particle systems would require us to sort every particle back to front, we can go in that direction (all weapon effects would need to be sorted as well) or we can go in the direction of subber dubber fast particles were there could be 30 times as many (more like 120 times as many as there are now))

and I've realy realy thought about haveing ships that die while fireing there weapons keep fireing there weapons as they die, though it would realy realy suck to get hit after you kill the last bad guy and your sheilds are down and you only have 1% hull left

[Carl]

all you really need to make smoke in FS2 is to take the particle spew, make it spew more particles per second, have the particles be bigger, and change the animation from an orange thing fading away to a puff of smoke diffusing away.

[Turnsky]

*imagines "last starfighter" spinning manuever*

[Mav]

Originally posted by Raptor
The only flaw with that is that when a dying capship fires a beam, then splits apart, the beam glow point does not move with the turret.  I've even seen beams power up and fire when the turret model is no longer there. ...

I agree with that. And it also doesn't care if the turret's still in existence.
But if this was implemented correctly (beam moving with turret SObj & stop firing right when turret SObj is no longer visible), it could be rather interesting. And I think this would be rather hard to do via Fred - would it? (yell at me, if you need, I'm not that experienced in Freding)

[Carl]

Originally posted by Turnsky
*imagines "last starfighter" spinning manuever*

the spitflower? that wouldn't work.

[Flipside]

I thought it was the Death Blossom

And it still wouldn't work

Alas

[Starfighter]

Originally posted by Flipside
I thought it was the Death Blossom

And it still wouldn't work

Alas

Just make a new partical entry avalibale in the game then add in a smoke/fire trail partical ANI, bind that to the ship hulls only then normal particals are still free for Beam weapons. this would be easy to code and do with the SCP.

Also a batter looking partical like a white glowing ball that sparcals would be nice would look better on ships as the explode to easy thing to do with ANIs too.