[Jetmech Jr.]

1. "Leeching" Missiles. Essentially, your typical "attach to target and start draining weapons and Afterburners" missile. Are these possible?

2. Is there any way to improve the Electrical effects when ships are damaged? Make them more flashy, or something?

[Carl]

the electrical effects are not to be messed with. they are supposed to be subtle and not big thick pipes.

[Jetmech Jr.]

I understand that, but they look incredibly dull, especially when you have and ship and 10% and they're flying all over the place.

[Unknown Target]

Yea, they should at least be glowy and actually look like electricity, imho.

[WMCoolmon]

Have you compared the electrical arcs in the most recent builds to the ones in Freespace 2? (or 3.6.5 for that matter)

[Trivial Psychic]

Originally posted by Jetmech Jr.
1. "Leeching" Missiles. Essentially, your typical "attach to target and start draining weapons and Afterburners" missile. Are these possible?

There is the "esuck" flag, but as far as I know it only works for primaries... though I've never heard of anyone trying it.

[Nuke]

i think esuck works for secondaries too. as for the ellectrical effects id like to be able to use those for model detail. add extra glopoint types that emit the electrical effects rather than glows. radius could set the maximum jump distance. electricity will jump between points within eachothers effective radius and seesntially behave like glowpoints.

[FireCrack]

Lotsa sparks at the ends of bolts too.

[Gregster2k]

I think ideally we need to have the bolts look like actual bolts from sci-fi movies. Wrath of Khan when the nacelle of the Reliant is blown off electrical arc bolts. Tesla coil. Either of those are perfect inspiration. Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Jedi Knight II and Academy all have decent inspiring bolts of lightning that might be worth looking into.

Personally, i think that the complexity (number of forks in the lightning) and the brightness of the bolts just need to be tuned up for now. Maybe add a command line multiplier to change number of variations in the arcing bolts' lines?

[Getter Robo G]

Anyone know why the lightning in the game turned to big blue blocky things?  I think someone posted a pic of the effect long ago and I've finally got tired of seeing it enough to ask...

[taylor]

It was changed from pure lines to quads because it killed OpenGL mode.  The problem in OGL was later fixed but most people liked the new effect (I think).  It still didn't look great but WMCoolmon added some white parts to it so that it wasnt' just plain blue with holes in the arcs.  One of the reasons I like the new effect is that it scales with the distance so a ship close up would have arcs that look larger than single pixel widths and a ship that's further away would have arcs that are tiny rather than the same single pixel width.  Basically it's more realistic in my view.

[FireCrack]

Are they a solid color, or do they have a texture? If sthey are solid would it be difficult to add texture support?

[taylor]

Originally posted by FireCrack
Are they a solid color, or do they have a texture? If sthey are solid would it be difficult to add texture support?

No texture but not a single color either, it's two colors.  Actually I kind of want to change it to use the type of lightning arcs that are in nebula missions and would be textured.  I think that Bobboau was talking at one point about using the missile trail code instead though I personally don't like that idea since I can't see it looking as good.

I'm not sure what's going to happen but it will change at some point and should be more flexible too so that you could have different arc textures for different ships.  The lightning arcs seem like something that would be good to mod for the various projects.

[WMCoolmon]

Actually, it's three colors now.

 I guess some sort of lightning data could be added, with the overall size and color of the lines settable.