[StratComm]

Originally posted by Carl


A fleet battle couldn't really loop, (Command! the Collosus is down! THE COLLOSUS IS DOWN! oh, wait, now it's back up.) so you'd need to make it all from beginning to end with no repeating frames, and since a battle usually lasts a good few minutes, you'd have a huge file on your hands. So any reasonably sized background battle animation would look totally pants.

Well, if you are doing it for a sense of scale it could.  There is that mission in Derelict where a heavily-scripted battle goes on in the distance (with actual ships, so admitedly it's a bit different).  After the Vasudan destroyer goes down, all the ships are made invulnerable and the battle just rages in the distance.  You could do something similar with animated backgrounds, if just to give the impression of a larger engagement.  If you wanted something to explode, put it in as an actual ship.  The problem is, unless the ships in question are really huge, anything you do as a background would have to be either super-small or blown up to a large size, and the problem with the latter is that those ships should exist in the combat area if you were to fly to them and the trick of animating them into the background would be painfully obvious.

[mikhael]

Originally posted by Carl


A fleet battle couldn't really loop, (Command! the Collosus is down! THE COLLOSUS IS DOWN! oh, wait, now it's back up.) so you'd need to make it all from beginning to end with no repeating frames, and since a battle usually lasts a good few minutes, you'd have a huge file on your hands. So any reasonably sized background battle animation would look totally pants.

You don't watch enough anime. Big fleet battles in the far distance can loop quite well. You just make sure that all plot critical ships are in the player's area and that stuff off in the distance are mostly stationary, lobbing missiles/bombs at each other. The player should be paying attention to things local to him anyway. The stuff in the distance is just filler.

[CP5670]

This might be useful for me as well. I have this one mission in the middle of a spread-out asteroid field; I used Ice Heart's asteroid backgrounds to simulate a big asteroid field, but they look a little strange since they are always in the same place (and are also a bit blurry).

It also might be cool for having rapidly-rotating neutron stars and such things.

[Nico]

Originally posted by Carl


A fleet battle couldn't really loop, (Command! the Collosus is down! THE COLLOSUS IS DOWN! oh, wait, now it's back up.) so you'd need to make it all from beginning to end with no repeating frames, and since a battle usually lasts a good few minutes, you'd have a huge file on your hands. So any reasonably sized background battle animation would look totally pants.

Just Think XWA, it just had lots off star destroyers pics in the background. Just add random eplosions above all those ships, et voila. you don't have to put anything critical like ships going down and stuff, you jaust need some motion in there.

[J.F.K.]

Originally posted by Venom
well yeah, ani are too damn big anyway. how about replacing them with gif files?

Now that would be something. Animation is hard enough, let alone adding all this proprietary format business.

[Flaser]

Originally posted by ZylonBane
As far as background upgrades go, I'm still hoping for generalized skybox support, as described in the first page of this thread.

Why not a sky-sphere I know it was already mentioned, but I'm interested in your reason?

Back to topic:
If background objects could be swapped or inserted/removed during a mission with actual events (extended background editor, maybe 3ds max - timeline like) that would open up a whole range of possibilities without being forced to use huge files.

So smg. could go on a loop, and later the same thing could be shown as it blows, but that's another animation.

[Bobboau]

when I get done with my little thruster thing, I'll look into asigning a pof file as a background pof (ie sky box/sphere/whatever)

[IceFire]

Yay...now I can make distant nebula crackle with electricity and nastyness

[Styxx]

Originally posted by Bobboau
when I get done with my little thruster thing, I'll look into asigning a pof file as a background pof (ie sky box/sphere/whatever)

Yes, and remember to load the POF rotational data as it would be on a normal ship POF.

[Krackers87]

Originally posted by Carl


A fleet battle couldn't really loop, (Command! the Collosus is down! THE COLLOSUS IS DOWN! oh, wait, now it's back up.) so you'd need to make it all from beginning to end with no repeating frames, and since a battle usually lasts a good few minutes, you'd have a huge file on your hands. So any reasonably sized background battle animation would look totally pants.

You could just have small explosions but no ships blowing up

just occxasional beams.

or have them warp back in.

[Lightspeed]

yeah, there are ways to create background battle ani's

[mnftg64]

How would you do this, just creat the ANI then put it in the tbl as a backround file?

[Krackers87]

ya, the game searches for a .pcx and if it cant find one loads a .ani

you cant see it in FRED but you can make a placeholder.pcx to see where it would be. Then remove the .pcx before playing.

[Falcon]

Originally posted by Carl


A fleet battle couldn't really loop, (Command! the Collosus is down! THE COLLOSUS IS DOWN! oh, wait, now it's back up.) so you'd need to make it all from beginning to end with no repeating frames, and since a battle usually lasts a good few minutes, you'd have a huge file on your hands. So any reasonably sized background battle animation would look totally pants.

Why not place ships at an extreme distance then make them invulnerable. I tried this once and it worked.

[StratComm]

This works (was done quite well in Derelict if memory serves) but it's always just capital ships.  Now if someone did this, and placed an animation behind them with little explosions (fighters) and such, then THAT would be a cool use of the effect.