[DaBrain]

I came up with a few ideas, maybe one of them is good enough to be worth beeing worked on.


Debris trails - By adding some big trails to the debris parts of a ship, explosions would look a lot nicer.
I think it's more complicated to code, but optionally trails for the particles would look nice too. It should look a bit like motion blurred particles. Particle trails might look even better.


Debris glow - I'm not taling about glow maps, but something that works the same way. It's just active during the explosion of a ship. The intersections would look less bad and the whole effect would look a lot better.

Post process effects - I've absolutely no idea how complex this might be. I guess this was suggested many times before. I was just thinking about the intersection problems. A post process glow wouln't have this kind of problem.

Beams, warps, explosions and a lot of other stuff would (possibly!) look a lot better. I guess this requires a MAX Video Post-like object detection system.


I'm not really sure if Bob's material system will support this, so I'm suggesting it again.


Different sized EFF frames - Sometimes I want to create animated maps that only have some action one in a while. The rest of the time they're either black, or at least they don't have to be animated. Adding hundred 'empty' frames really isn't a good solution, but I thought about using 1*1 pixel frames instead of asking for a complex pause system.  Not perfect, but good enough.

[StratComm]

Can't you state the same frame more than once in the current EFF heirarchy?  Or does that make the same image get loaded all over the place?

[DaBrain]

Only if you use a single frame. Otherwise it will just go through all frames.

If you want to have a pause there are two ways right now:

Reduce the fps (stutter-power! )
Increase the frame count (bye bye memory)



It's not that important, but it would be really nice.

[Sticks]

Where exactly does the simple come in?

[Bobboau]

the materials system could handle some of that.
I don't think adding trails to debris would be too hard on the surface, but getting an actual final in game effect out of it would probly be a lot harder than you'd think.

[DaBrain]

Originally posted by Sticks
Where exactly does the simple come in?

I thought the trail code would be easy to add, because you've added trail support to almost everything else already.

And I thought the debris glow works like the a part of the cloaking effect, just with a different... "trigger". (?)

Originally posted by Bobboau
the materials system could handle some of that.
I don't think adding trails to debris would be too hard on the surface, but getting an actual final in game effect out of it would probly be a lot harder than you'd think.

Ok, I've almost no coding experience (and especially not with C++).

Anyway, I'm really glad the material system allows those post process effect.

When I play or see other games, I ask myself 'what exactly looks better than in FS2?'.
Well, I just saw a nice clip of Eve online. Most ships are not much more complex than in FS2. The textures are even worse, but the shading effects male them look more real. The post process effects are a big ambience plus too.

With this FS2 could look instantly a lot better.

[Nuke]

id like to see skyboxed based lighting. i saw a per pixel lighting system in a quake engine mod that looked pretty cool (but at a major performance hit). but only use it for skyboxes. perhaps a -light texture wich would be like -glow but would emit light rather than draw fullbright. that way you could get more accurately lighted skyboxes.

[taylor]

Originally posted by DaBrain
Different sized EFF frames - Sometimes I want to create animated maps that only have some action one in a while. The rest of the time they're either black, or at least they don't have to be animated. Adding hundred 'empty' frames really isn't a good solution, but I thought about using 1*1 pixel frames instead of asking for a complex pause system.  Not perfect, but good enough.

I'm currently planning these three things:

1) different sized EFFs (like you say) since I think that would be a very good thing and is something that I had intended to do from the beginning.  I had experimented with this but found it problematic.  Hopefully I'll have it working to my satisfaction and get it into public hands for too long. (not soon though, it's not priority)

2) ghost frames, ie. a frame or series of frames that don't exist as actual files but will basically pad the frame count with (virtual) blank images that take no memory.  The frames that should be ghosted will be specified in the EFF file and any number of frames in any order can be ghosted.

3) specified duplicate frames, rather than having two or more identical frames as real files you can specify that one frame, or a series of frames, is just a copy of one other real image and it won't use any extra memory.

[Sticks]

Originally posted by DaBrain

When I play or see other games, I ask myself 'what exactly looks better than in FS2?'.
Well, I just saw a nice clip of Eve online. Most ships are not much more complex than in FS2. The textures are even worse, but the shading effects male them look more real. The post process effects are a big ambience plus too.

With this FS2 could look instantly a lot better.

Check out some pics of X3: The Reunion over at Egosoft's site. That's how FS2 will be looking in the future.