[Lt.Cannonfodder]

Working with DaBrain creating new explosion effects for MindGames, I noticed that there's very little room for creativity with the current restrictions. There can be only two different explosions for the game to choose from when a ship goes boom. Now, would it be possible to add a few more explosions animations to make things more interesting? For example, I create a new explosion animation named exp01.eff and add it to fireball.tbl as the thrid ship explosion. Would this be hard to implement?

Expanding upon that idea, how about species or ship specific explosions? Something that could be defined in the ships.tbl. This would allow some very nice oppoturnities, or what do you think of shivan ships exploding in vividly red colors due to alien atmosphere, hull and fuel composition

[krisvek]

ooo....i especially like those later ideas of yours...

each species' ship could have a slightly different explosion, due to the differences in ship composition, feul, weapon ammo, etc.

vasudans could have a purple/yellow tint (or green, doesnt matter, the idea is what counts)
shivans could have a crimson look, and yeah...mebbe even some simple variations on simply how the explosion looks too (boom-boom-BOOM, BOOM-boom-boom, and boom-BOOM-boom.....pop!, etc.)

[Psychonaut]

There are restrictions for the shockwave, too. Playing around with the tables has no effect. I think it´s coded somewhere in the FSO-build, which means, that this would be a job for the code wizzard like WMC or Bob.

[Fury]

But just think about memory usage which will grow exponentially even if you use DDS...

[DaBrain]

I suggested to use the material system to slightly recolor the explosions without loading a whole new one into the memory.

[Omniscaper]

I second that motion. Perhaps even add some lens flares to the explosions and variate those.

[krisvek]

could the materials system do that with the explosions?  that'd be cool
anyhow...i'm not too worried about memory as is...but obviously, there should be a backward-compatibility for users who do need to worry about that stuff, that sets all the explosions to the normal look (or rather, the current "normal" advanced look)

lens flare....  needa get more people coding...that way more could be done at a time;  i'd like things to get cleaned up and improved enough so that the lighting in the game is as realistic as possible, that is one of the biggest things graphically to me

casting shadows, light from explosions working better, more lens flare....reflected light would be cool to be able to take into account (like, the sunlight reflected off of a planet)

but i'm getting carried away...  is there any way this engine can be made "free-form"-explorational like IWAR and such?  lol
or Orbiter for that matter, heheh....with rotating planets and all....ooooo

[WMCoolmon]

You could use the materials system to have a different explosion *look* based on what species the ship was.

[Fury]

My mind blew when it tried to comprehend the materials system. Now it is just in a catatonic state after trying to comprehend the armor.tbl.

[WMCoolmon]

If I redesign it again it'll probably just end up even harder to understand.

[Singh]

The material system appears horrendously complex >_<

However, the armor system seems pretty damn simple in comparision....