[Sesquipedalian]

How exactly is it determined which ani files a ship will use when exploding?  I had just assumed there would be an entry in the ships.tbl like there is for the impact explosion of a weapon in the weapons.tbl, but it seems there is not.  Where is this information specified?

[Starfury]

Looks like it's fireball.tbl  

[Sesquipedalian]

Yes, but there are two ani's referenced for that in fireball, exp05 and exp06.  Fireball just lists various explosion (and warpout) anis.  I want to know how it is determined which one is used by a given ship when it explodes, with a view towards adding another entry in fireball and having a ship use the ani listed in the new entry.

Perhaps I should explicate the details of my question more fully.  Say I shoot at a cargo container and blow it up.  When it explodes, an explosion ani is played.  This ani will either been exp05.ani or exp06.ani, as listed in fireball.tbl.  However, fireball.tbl does not contain any info regarding which one of these will be used by the cargo contanier I have just shot to death.  What I want to know is where the information is stored that tells FS2 which of these two ani's to use for a specific ship class.

[This message has been edited by Sesquipedalian (edited 01-28-2002).]

[Nico]

you can't, it choose a random one between the two ani.

[aldo_14]

Which is a good thing, as it adds some realistic 'randomness' to the games explosions.

[Sesquipedalian]

Ah.  Very well. I have another idea I can try then.

[CP5670]

I was also playing around with this stuff about a month ago and came to the same conclusion; the game apparently chooses randomly between the last two ani's in the file for ship explosions. You can change both of them though if you want to have it so that the same thing is displayed every time.

btw did anyone notice that the explode1.ani file (inside sparky_fs2.vp) looks a lot like an explosion from Descent 1/2?

[Nico]

yes, and you can also find the ani when you break a screen in D1/2 somewhere in the vpfiles  . Dunno why it's even there, it's not used in FS2.

[Galemp]

I wish FS had 'dry' explosions. I expect a fireball when you kill a fighter, but an asteroid or cargo container should just crumble into dust and debris.

------------------
"An evil mind is a constant comfort."
Revisit the Great War at The Freespace-Freespace 2 Port Project