Hard Light Productions Forums
Community Projects => The FreeSpace Upgrade Project => Topic started by: Backslash on February 20, 2006, 07:28:24 pm
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Anyone that knows about shockwaves, what exactly does the "Expl blast" stat do? The comments say "The intensity of the blast effect when you're within the outer radius". Is that just the amount of buffeting caused, since damage is covered in different stats?
If so, I had an inspiration: why not lower or eliminate this effect, for DaBrain's fighter shockwaves? For those who like the look of the fighter shockwaves, the common complaint is still that it affects game balance, what with the buffeting of the other surrounding fighters/bombers in a wing when you destroy one. So, I made a tbm to try out this change [not to mention, let us add fighter shockwaves without having to have a complete ships.tbl replacement].
What do you think? I don't know, perhaps the setting should be reduced instead of eliminated? Someone who knows a bit more about how explosions work could probably help here.
[edit: whoops. fixed]
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Uh... might want to update your file. There is nothing in it.
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Well, the reason I don't want shockwaves on fighters is because they're special things. You blow up something huge, you get a shockwave and think "damn..that was big...". If you you get a shockwave for everything, it kinda loses it's awe factor. I wouldn't mind bombers having shockwaves though.
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That's easy! [attached] Try it out. In some ways, just bombers does makes sense. (though, I made support ships and transports have it too, since they currently are boring :D)
Yeah I see where you're coming from. Me, I enjoyed it in Wing Commander Prophecy way back when, so got a kick out of DaBrain's 'bonus'. But what I did was have the main shockwaves be the nice blue ones, and have the smaller ship shockwaves be DaBrain's smaller orange ones, just "f_shockwave.pof" and "f_shockwave.dds". http://www.game-warden.com/starfox/Non_SF_related_stuff/SW3D_Mid-range.rar . (Thanks DaBrain!) This way, the big shockwaves still look awesome and kick your craft around too, while the small orange ones kinda add to the explosion of small ships.
(Hmm, that inspires me -- what would it look like if I changed the color of the bomb explosions? Greenish? Purplish? :p)
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Although it was never a big deal, I have always noticed that the shockwaves for bombs and certain missiles were the same compared to those of ship over 1000 times larger. To add to that, all of the explosions for bombs and certain missiles are the same. I have always wanted to see some kind of variation to exist between the weapons' explosions based on their purpose. For example, some sort of electrical effect on the EM Pulse, or some type of dramatic explosion on the Helios that proves that it is the most powerful weapon in the game.
On a final note, I have always wondered if it was possible to rework the supernova at the end of the last mission. Although this is only a game and not a NASA simulation, the supernova at the end should be the most dramatic explosion in the game. I was thinking more on the lines of this, but slowed down...
https://webspace.utexas.edu/maa945/www/hst15_supernova.mpeg
Sorry for getting off topic there, but yeah, I think it would be cool if you changed up the bombs explosions somehow.
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That's a nice animation! :)
As for shockwaves, I'm pretty sure under the SCP you can assign different 3D Shockwaves to different ships using the table files, however, I'm not sure about the 2D Animated shockwaves. It would be nice, since, whilst I like the 3D shockwaves, I actually prefer the 2D ones personally.
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Should be noted though that shockwaves are the easiest way to use up texture slots and memory of all effects in the game. Feel free to experiment, but keep that in mind and be careful when adding more.
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To be honest, they are still using systems that are extremely similar to the original FS2 animations in Eve Online, an explosion followed by a somewhat familiar 2D expanding shockwave ;)
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Because there has yet to be a 3d shockwave that's not a plane with a 2d texture applied to it, that looks good. 3d shockwaves are ugly...
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In order to produce the 3d shockwave you would have to create an expanding orb of energy of sorts. As far as that goes, I'll have to agree with Raa in that I like the 2D planer version myself.
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Because there has yet to be a 3d shockwave that's not a plane with a 2d texture applied to it, that looks good. 3d shockwaves are ugly...
That is bull****. :p
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Because there has yet to be a 3d shockwave that's not a plane with a 2d texture applied to it, that looks good. 3d shockwaves are ugly...
That is bull****. :p
Oh? Are we playing jeopardy?
What is what's inside Cobra's head?
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$1000 goes to Raa for the correct answer-question.
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Because there has yet to be a 3d shockwave that's not a plane with a 2d texture applied to it, that looks good. 3d shockwaves are ugly...
That is bull****. :p
Oh? Are we playing jeopardy?
What is what's inside Cobra's head?
I think the more important question is
What is do you honestly want to know whats inside Cobra's head? :p
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when ever something that blows up and needs a shockwave even a warhead my computor grindes to a halt. I use to think i had a pretty high end comp. Pentium 4, wind xp, 1 gig of ram, Geforce 5500 fx pci graphics card 256mb. but i guess the stuff you guys are doing are now is to much for it.
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No, I think a few people have mentioned this problem. Is it using the 2D shockwaves that come with FS2 or the new 3D ones?
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Personally, I'm just using normal explosios on fighters (alltough a bit biger) and of course a aincrease in the damage and radiou of hte explosions. the Suppoer ship now blows with a big bang and the capships....well...let's jsut say you'd better be far away when they blow.
Passed the original campaign without anay problems whatsoever.
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Personally, I'm just using normal explosios on fighters (alltough a bit biger) and of course a aincrease in the damage and radiou of hte explosions. the Suppoer ship now blows with a big bang and the capships....well...let's jsut say you'd better be far away when they blow.
:doubt: I have a friend that likes to change his tables to severely bend the game phyisics, like making a missle explosion about......10^5 radius. It's very sad. (Of course I always like to see him as sidistic anyway)
[EDIT]Scratch that, after talking with him, I have underestimated his radius.....10^6 to 10^10........and also applied them to cap ships and nomal fighters.
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Overkill.....
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I took out the fighter shockwaves because they were a pain (ie they changed balance, because your ship shook for a second or two after killing each. and. every. fighter.)
Even for bombers, it'd make certain missions harder, because you'd have to finish shaking before you could target the next bomber or the bombs.
You can specify different 2D and 3D shockwaves on individual basises (up to 5 or 8 IIRC) but that will use massive numbers of image slots, if they're all full animations.
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No, I think a few people have mentioned this problem. Is it using the 2D shockwaves that come with FS2 or the new 3D ones?
Im using the 3d shockwaves. It was better when i turned off use tga and jpg textures. Perhaps i sugesst being more efficent with the shockwaves. Someones home computor cant handle 5 shockwaves going at once from a raid of bombs hitting a ship and then the ship exploding. I cant even handle one with out a massive slow down. (which takes away from the impressiveness )
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I took out the fighter shockwaves because they were a pain (ie they changed balance, because your ship shook for a second or two after killing each. and. every. fighter.)
No that's my point, that's why I made this table; I set the "Expl blast effect" for fighters to 0 and now it doesn't shake anything around. (try it! it's good!) Hence my question: does this 'Expl blast effect' affect anything else besides the shaking?
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Possibly damage, but with fighters that's going to be generally negligible (and might be in there anyway)
I personally dislike fighter/bomber shockwaves too, since they weren't in retail (Although Volition had the ability to put them in), some mods, such as Derelict, have used them as a 'special effect' for special fighter explosions - and I think they were used in FS1 to that effect too, but I'm not sure. And finally they just seem to cross the line of making things look good, and just adding effects because we can.
My ideal situation would be to have the fighter shockwaves as an optional patch in the wiki, possibly with other patches that are along similar lines...with modular tables it's relatively easy. Call it something like "mp_fshcokwaves.vp" and link to it from the SCP site and Getting Started guides. That way I don't have to deal with people griping about them or for them every month. :p
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My idea would be only adding shockwaves if fighters and bombers had boms aboard, but that would require coding.
I think saying, "OHHHH, I hit his magazines!" would be cool, but would rather have no shockwaves over shockwaves on everything.
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Meh, just make FSO disable use of fighter shockwaves in campaigns that do not implicitly enable it.
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That's how it is now...if you want your campaign to have fighter shockwaves, you just drop a .tbl or .tbm in with them.
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The best shockwave in my opinion is the one off the Lucifer in the Endgame cutscene.