Question though (what a surprise 
): the solid colour strip look kinda makes me think more of a ribbon than a bolt of lightning to be honest, but I'm assuming that you can't assign a texture to the strip?
Actually, it is possible to use a texture rather than just a solid color, it is just a poly like any other effect uses after all. The problem is that it's almost 100% waste. The arcs are seldomly more than a couple of pixels wide, and you simply wouldn't be able to see much in the way of texture detail in them even if you were up close. We'd really just be better off tweaking the coloring rather than messing around with a texture. That way we can cut the render time down for the arcs and perhaps do some neater things with them in the future without dealing with textures at all.
If that's the case, might some sort of simple colour gradient be possible then? Just a white->blue/purple from the centre to the outside edge I reckon would look awesome.
I was thinking the same thing.
I coded the function in question (a new one, to batch the entire arc and render it at one time) so that it's easy to render each arc multiple times, with a different color and width. That should allow us to have the current blue outside and then a white center, as one example. There are actually quite a few possibilities, but I haven't gotten far enough to actually test all of that yet. I was looking over some thing I found through Google last night about that and trying to come up with a few ideas of how that can be applied to our case.
Overall this is still pretty low priority for me, but based on what I shown and told you so far, I'm sure that all of you can come up with an idea or two to make proper use of the new code effect. About the only reason that I'm working on it right now is that I'm upgrading some other OGL rendering stuff and converting the lightning arcs to use it was a very good test of the new code.
Oh, and this quite effectively kills D3D support, as I am not going to add support for this stuff to anything but OGL. This means that for everyone that still hasn't made the switch to OGL, you aren't going to have a choice any longer. Even if the D3D code still compiles, it can't handle the effect without an upgrade. It will be up to someone else to make the D3D code compatible at some point in the future.
I've never really thought about it before now, but it's occured to me that the lightning effect could be really useful for quite a lot of things if we could control it.
Eg, if we could define points/pairs of points from/between which lightning can arc, and had a scripted/SEXPed trigger mechanism of some kind, it should become possible to make things like lightning guns, fancy new non-subspace FTL drive effects, have weapon impacts that spew lightning, turrets that charge up with lightning jumping to them from random/set points on the hull, constant lightning effects that are just a feature of a ship etc.
The current code just takes two points, it then randomly fills in more points between those two in order to make the full arc. So it really could do some rather neat things, and be random by design. With with the new g3_draw_rod(), which actually renders the arcs, it would be easy to do something completely different with it even. For effects that would really show it off it would be worth using textures on it, or even more elaborate color sets. The part of the code which actually generates the random stuff in between the two original points is a single, rather simple, function and it wouldn't be difficult to do much more with it in the future.
Oh, and yeah - please leave in the lightning effect for the ship lab. It's the kind of thing that just strikes me as belonging in there. 
Ok, guess I'll leave it in. It would probably be more work to remove it at this point anyway.
The effect does just play out like in-game btw, so it's just random arcs which are going all over the ship. Because of the random nature of the arc, there is no way to actually pause it or anything, since it doesn't render the exact same way twice. One thing that it doesn't do (at least not yet) is produce the light effect that goes along with the arc. I don't know that I'll bother to add that, at least not at first. It also doesn't work on debris at the moment, so I don't know if that is something anyone wants or not. It wouldn't be that difficult to add to debris, but it would be something of a pain, so I probably won't add it without a proper virgin sacrifice, or something.
