[swashmebuckle]

I know everyone's still working on 3.6.10 but I want to get this down before I forget.

So this is a two part request:

1) To make it so that you can have separate animations play for shield vs hull hits on a per-weapon basis in the weapons.tbl, with each kind being able to set the explosion radius independently.

2) To make it so that within the shield or hull impact explosions categories you can list a number of different animations and the game will choose from them at random for any given hit.

What I'd like to be able to do is fill in the weapon entry in the table with something like this:

Code: [Select]

$Shield Impact Explosion:            shieldhit
$Shield Impact Explosion Radius:     2.5
$Shield Impact Explosion:            shieldhit
$Shield Impact Explosion Radius:     3.5
$Impact Explosion:            flashhit
$Impact Explosion Radius:     4.0
$Impact Explosion:            sparkhit
$Impact Explosion Radius:     3.5
$Impact Explosion:            flarehit
$Impact Explosion Radius:     2.0
And have the game automatically throw a little variety into the blowing-stuff-up experience.  This would help out SWC a lot because there are only a couple types of weapon in use and looking at red/green/blue laser blasts gets a little old after a while, but it could also be exploited for FS or any other mod, especially in cases where a weapon has a big statistical disparity in how it performs against shields compared to hull.  Thanks!

[karajorma]

I know everyone's still working on 3.6.10.

No we aren't.

Someone hasn't been paying attention to nightly builds at all.

[DaBrain]

Sorry, but as long as the shield system looks as crappy as it does right now, spending even a minute of work on it, would be a waste of time.

And having more different effects for it won't make it more pretty in any way.

[swashmebuckle]

@Kara- OK, well the point is that everyone's working on something besides my awesome impact effects idea.  I mean, what's up with that? 

@Da- Yeah I see your point, but shields in SW are invisible (at least in the original trilogy) and all you see are the impact explosions, so this would be ideal for us. I agree that the FS shield-lighting-up effect is pretty outdated looking compared to the present modeling standards, but having a variety of qualitatively different effects (not just varying the number of particles, etc.) could be useful even in an updated system for hull hits, reinforcing the illusion that you are firing on an actual functional ship that is not uniformly armored.  Some of your shots could just be going "ping" and deflecting off while some might hit a fuel line and result in a spectacular fireball.  It's not perfect of course, but it'd be a way to liven things up without requiring a complete overhaul.

[Komet Jpn]

As a part of Japanese localization project, I made some good enhancements on impact effects:
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=65667.40

Sample Movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH-ZQd6vwzI

It is currently not yet marged to SCP, but it is nice to marge it to SCP. However, I made those enhancements in dirty way: I hard coded it without ability to control by tbl file. And yes, it should be able to be controlled by tbl file when you marge it to SCP. Just like:

Code: [Select]

$Impact Explosion: filename
$Impact Explosion Radius: #.#
$Impact Explosion Lifetime: #.# ;; in seconds
$Impact Explosion Flash: filename
$Impact Explosion Flash Radius: #.#
$Impact Explosion Flash Lifetime: #.# ;; in seconds
$Hull Impact Explosion: filename
$Hull Impact Explosion Radius: #.#
$Hull Impact Explosion Life: #.# ;; in seconds
$Hull Impact Explosion Flash: filename
$Hull Impact Explosion Flash Radius: #.#
$Hull Impact Explosion Flash Lifetime: #.#
"$Impact Explosion Lifetime": Optional. I gave bomb explosions long lifetime in my version and it looked good. So lets have this so that you can have long lifetime for explosion lifetime.

"$Impact Explosion Flash/Radius/Lifetime": Optional. In my version, it is hard coded but already look good. So it is good to show flash with hard coded default params when those params are missing. And you should expressly set "none" for "$Impact Explosion Flash" to disable flash.

"$Hull ***": Optional. If hull impact explosion params are missing, same effects are used both for shield impact and hull impact.

So required params are "$Impact Explosion:" and "$Impact Explosion Radius:" only, and it should work fine with all other optional params missing. But you can control details of effects by having optional params.

[Zacam]

Thanks for the info on that Komet. I'm sure somebody will figure out how to add it in a way that makes it TBL/TBM possible.

Wanderer already pulled off the Beams with some additional TBL/TBM data.