[Turambar]

you know those captial ship glob cannons?
you know how, when you're flying toward a ship, and theyre firing at you, and the globs are flying at you at a steep angle, and they look L-shaped somewhat?

would it be possible, and this would make it look better too, that instead of wierd looking image files, the glob cannons fired low-polygon models, maybe with see-thru glow textures and glowpoints on them.  these would look good at any angle, and would come out of the gun barrels better (have them appear inside the barrel and fly out, instead of the current method, where they just sort of appear in front of the barrel).  Add that, with maybe some sort of 3d muzzle flare (because of the problem where, with a moving ship the muzzle flare would stay still while the ship moved), and maybe some recoil, and you'd have something thoroughly cool looking.  This is just with the capship turrets.  Fighter cannons dont seem to have this problem, probably because the shots are moving so fast, and are much smaller, so its hard to see the L-shape deformation.


i might be able to help with some texture stuff, but i don't know modelling or coding, so that will be up to you guys

i'm just throwing the idea out there.  what do you think?

[FireCrack]

Apperently the problem of the muzzle flare staying still has been recently fixed, but capship turrets still seem to lack support for actualy using them.

I've actualy already made some textures for these muzzle flares should they be implemented...


Oh, and i recenly found out if you go through the weapons.tbl and multiply the impact explosion radius by about 3 for all capship weapons they look better.

[Flipside]

Problem with 3D models of shots is that they will always look pants without shaders. Using a bmp image is faster and looks better on lower spec systems. The 'curving' effect is, I think, related to Field of View. Personally I like the flexibility of the current system

[Turambar]

i think maybe a very simple animated glowpoint would be a huge improvement over the current effect

just, like a normal glowpoint, but with a couple extra frames to give it a sort of shimmer.  it would look cool, and always be facing the player, so it would always appear spherical, instead of the flat versions we have now

oh well, just an idea

[Nuke]

what about volumetric glows, those would be cool.

[FireCrack]

Well... we have that "rayball" stuff that bob made, it just cant be put on guns yet...

[Turambar]

oooh that'd be sweet

[DaBrain]

what about volumetric glows, those would be cool.

Postprocess glows. That's what we need. Wait for Pixel Shader support.

Well... we have that "rayball" stuff that bob made, it just cant be put on guns yet...

Sounds quite interesting. Where can I find some more infos about this?

[FireCrack]

Umm.. it's refrenced in the code for the warp portal, it's used for the big starry flashes when it opens and closes. If you find it there you should be able to locate it elsewhere...

[Nuke]

fsopen tends to have trouble rendering the existing globs. it like that volumetric golw effect to be based on a gradient map render it in some mathmatically defined shape, a sphere or a beam or flame for example. perhaps use it for beam cannons, thruster effects, blob guns, lasers. also perhaps use larger ones for localized nebulas. bitmap effects just seem abit oudated, it would also save on texture space.

[Flipside]

It'd be loveely to have that but procedural volumetrics take a lot of Processor time Having a gunfight in a dense nebula would drop most systems to a complete crawl.