Hard Light Productions Forums
Community Projects => The FreeSpace Upgrade Project => Topic started by: Fury on December 08, 2010, 01:21:51 am
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Should FSU bring back modeled thrusters on ships and missiles?
Take a look at Diaspora trailers to see how modeled thruster cones on ships can do when they're done right. Modeled thruster cones are used in Diaspora capital ships.
http://www.diaspora-game.com/
And then there's missiles. Thruster effect capabilities on missiles frankly suck. They're much less than what we can do with ships. Hence I'm seriously asking to look at modeled thruster cones again for missiles too.
Perhaps a modeler could add modeled thruster cones back to something like Helios and say, Orion. Then we'll see what we can do effects-wise and compare.
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I like this idea, and actually I've been wanting this for a while now, as not only would they look better than sprites, they'd be no clipping issues and they'd be a lot better to use on irregularly shaped thrusters as well (i.e. anything not a complete circle).
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Please, please, pretty please
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Is it possible to do a mix off both? The flares look really nice on some things like the swarm missiles.
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Missile flares? Those are separate thing altogether and should/would be used regardless.
It's just that missiles are limited to a thruster glow, trail and particle spew at the moment. There's no real thruster effect unless missile has modeled thruster cone, which no missiles today have. So thruster effects on missiles are far more limited than even on ships without modeled thruster cones.
Which is why modeled thruster cones probably should make a return for both.
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Modeled thrusters don't have the ever-annoying flickering problems, not to mention they would also be free of clipping issues. I'd say that the possibility definitely needs to be explored.
Maybe it would even be possible to do some distortion shader effects on the thrusters...
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Not until the material system gets finished.
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I think that modelled thrusters could be a good idea if done right, somebody could try to create a better thruster effect.
Also, I wonder how difficult would it be to add a function to PCS2 for creating thruster cones.
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Also, I wonder how difficult would it be to add a function to PCS2 for creating thruster cones.
My guess is: Very, considering it would have to forst somehow decide which parts of the model are supposed to be the thrusters.
Computers are not good at recognizing features like that without very complex programming. Then it would need to actually model the thruster cones...
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I was rather thinking about "generate cones" button, which would take radius of a thruster glowpoint and generate a simple cone with "thruster01" texture applied.
Perhaps it could even have a bit more functionality than that (for example, allow manipulating the lenght of the cone, and perhaps the radius of it's other end, allowing the thruster mesh to be a cone, cylinder or something inbetween).
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Nothing like that is ever simple.
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IIRC, one of the POF manipulation programs had a button to generate shield mesh, so why not thrusters?
Also, when I said "simple cone", I didn't meant that the implementation would be simple, but that the cone would be just a cone (to get more interesting shapes, a modeling program would be nessesary).
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Shield meshes are easy, since the only requirement for them is that they have to cover the entire ship. You can take a simple globe model, scale it to match the biggest bounding box in terms of dimensions, and you can be pretty sure that the shield will cover everything.
Modelling a thruster cone is not that hard, and will always yield better results than something autogenerated.
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I know (in fact, even I can do it, sans texturing), but I think that autogeneration could come in handy for editing existing models.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but autogenerating thruster cone means generating a cylinder of with radius of one of it's bases identical to the radius of a selected thruster glowpoint, height and radius of a second base entered in a window that'd pop up after pressing the button.
This would work good for circular thrusters and have the adventage of being quick and easy for anybody who know how to work with PCS2.
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The problem is that shouldn't thruster cones be of same shape as thruster itself? Differently shaped thruster cone would just look weird. Not all thrusters are cones, and not all are even symmetrical.
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For those that are not, you'd need a modelling program, or a glow large enough to mask the difference.
As I said, autogeneration will never be a prefect method for everything, but for some ships (or testing the thruster effects) it may be good enough.
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I'm not sure if i like more the pic or model thrusters. The modeled ones seem too boxy for me. It's supposed to be a stream of particles, so if it has sharp edges, it ain't good. It should be blurry. Not to mention that it should alter shape while turning. Having a straight cone on a Shrieke while circling around another fighter will look just weird.
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I think it should be done with cones, particles, trails and bitmaps for the full effect.
Cones: Short flames close to the exhaust, becoming faint rapidly.
Particles: Engine smoke, which is faint close to the exhaust, but becomes more visible further out.
Trails: Background for everything when on AB, could be also a contrail for regular flight in atmosphere.
Thruster Bitmaps: Glow around the engine (thruster flame could also be used as background for cones and partices, but it'd require an effect genius to pull this off).
Of course, not all of this may be fit for FS (especially smoke can look non-FSy).
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I'm not sure if i like more the pic or model thrusters. The modeled ones seem too boxy for me. It's supposed to be a stream of particles, so if it has sharp edges, it ain't good. It should be blurry. Not to mention that it should alter shape while turning. Having a straight cone on a Shrieke while circling around another fighter will look just weird.
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First off, the only modeled thrusters we've seen in great detail are the ones from retail, from 11 to 12 years ago. They certainly wouldn't be boxy now and they certainly would be able to have particles as well.
Also, I wouldn't think that the flame from an engine would turn in space. Ships have maneuvering thrusters you know (see: the ani with the Poseidon picking up a cargo container in FS1)
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It would, as the "flame" is in fact a trail.
Also, thrust vectoring in addition to manouvering thrusters.
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He's not talking about a trail moving, he's talking about the actual plume coming from the engine, which would look pretty silly and unnatural if it rotated with the ship, IMO.
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From the physics POV, the plume should act like trail (hot, glowing gases ejected from the engine).
In fact, the plumes you see on modern jets appear only when using afterburners and are composed of burning fuel (which is injected into the engine after the main stage to increase thrust).
And you're right about the fact that it may not look good when being firmly attached to the ship.
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From the physics POV, the plume should act like trail (hot, glowing gases ejected from the engine).
Except the gases are flowing backwards at velocity v, in which v means "very high".
That means that from any practical standpoint, the plumes can be handled as rigid models that always point to the direction opposite from the thrust vector. If we're dealing with longer trails, then the particles' travel time from the thruster to the point where it doesn't glow any more will of course matter but for short thrusters, it's more or less like a rigid object as far as appearance goes.
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Wouldn't something more "realistic" require some volumetric particle system?
Modelled thrusters don't fix the fact that they stick out in one direction, always.
I mean, particle thrusters look great but LOLPERFORMANCE.
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@Had--: But because the particles, according to newton's 1st law, tend to remain in straight motion, maneuvering thrusters and thrust vectoring would only turn the deformated cone, not prevent it from deformating, because the vector of speed of the ship would change angle to the speed vector of the particles in the cone anyway, and the difference will grow with distance from the engine, as the cone of particles is not a solid object.
I think the trail-type is so far the best.
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There was a debate of sorts between me, Hades, Vasudan Admiral and Zacam on irc about thrusters.
Main points were as follows:
- Adding modeled thrusters back to ships and missiles is according to Zacam, too much work for too little gain.
- Zacam and Vasudan Admiral favor particle thrusters over modeled thruster cones.
- There are problems with particle thruster code that needs to be addressed.
These problems include but are not limited to:
- $Max created seems to either directly, or indirectly affect rendering distance of particles
* The higher value used in $Max created, the further away you can be before rendering of particles stop. But the closer you are, the more particles is rendered.
- Despite of $Max created, you have no real control over at what distance particles are no longer rendered
- When particle rendering stops, it is abrupt
- When particle rendering starts, it is again abrupt
- Missiles have no particle thrusters, only $pspew
- Some ship pofs have clipping issues, some are really serious such as GTD Orion's capital01.pof
- Rendering issues when particle effect is partially, but not fully out of view
- Heavy fps drop the closer you are to particle thrusters when value of $Max create is high(ish), which is needed for particle thrusters to be visible beyond an arm's reach
In addition I thought of something I thought to be clever. In the end it didn't work out, perhaps I messed up somewhere so I'll detail it out here.
Since particle rendering starts and stops abruptly, I came up with an idea of using current thruster bitmaps to smooth out the transition. I stole the design behind missile_flare, which uses mipmaps for its effect. The first mipmap is empty or black, it is practically invisible. The real flare begins from second mipmap and becomes stronger a few mipmaps, then starts fading out. Now, for thruster bitmaps I tried using black or empty mipmap for the first two mipmaps, with actual thruster bitmap starting from third mipmap.
This didn't work out as I had hoped. Thruster bitmaps were rendered even up close, but they were really small and thin. However, mipmaps worked exactly as they were supposed to and the thruster bitmap gradually became stronger the further away you got from the ship. In theory, this still can be used to smooth the transition between particle spew and thruster bitmaps, I just don't know where I went wrong with them.
To illustrate most of these issues mentioned above, I have uploaded a small mod (http://www.mediafire.com/?df963o7rd4i8zdd). The mod includes necessary tabling for GTC Fenris and GTD Orion, mipmapped terran thrusters and a demo mission.
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System looks good, but if this goes into the game, make sure it can be turned off just like the radar icons, because the fenris cut me down from 37 FPS to 23, and the Orion to 7 :p There are still people who use AGP and have virtual memory next to none :nervous:
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Please re-read my post. The mod was there to present the PROBLEMS as listed in the post above yours. Even performance issue was listed in the known problems caused by $Max create that needs to be a high value to render the bloody particle thrusters anywhere that is not within arm's reach.
Not to mention the demo uses shockwave01 for particle thruster since there was nothing better suited for it in the mediavps. It's horribly inefficient effect to be used in particle thrusters.
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I'd prefer thruster cones for ships such as the Aten and Thoth, that have linear engine arrays and are thus inadequately served by point-and-radius thrusters. (Would be nice if we could scale thrusters on their X and Y axes relative to model space, instead of an absolute radius, but that's wishful thinking.)