[Sarafan]

They just dont seem to be FS beams, actually they remind me of beams of Shadow Battlecrabs on B5.

[DaBrain]

You seem to be using the alpha channel...
 
Looks nice, but it's still too opaque. Try to make the beam fade out smoothly to the edges using the alpha channel.

[Bobboau]

or use JPG or 24bit TGAs instead.

[Mefustae]

Maybe still screens don't do them justice, but i'm not too impressed. They look a little... hyper for my tastes.

[Wanderer]

Hmm... I would make the center (smooth) red section much stronger and use various beam settings to get it drawn 'over' the other beam sections... and that combined with some translational settings for the 'edge' graphics.

[DaBrain]

or use JPG or 24bit TGAs instead.

I think the opacity is a wanted effect, but it's too much...

And additive blended beam + and alpha blended beam might look pretty awesome.

[Einstine909]

well ill save the ones now for the people that like them now and continue to work on them

[Apathy]

As much as I aplaud changing little things like this, shouldn't changes be for the better? No offense but it looks way too over done.

[Herra Tohtori]

Opinion based on screenies only.

Pro's:

-transparency
-creative freedom


Cons:

-they don't look like Freespace beams. Explanation on "why?" follows.

Why don't they look like FS beams?

I don't know if that's just the red beam, but it's way too dim. Further more, the transparent parts are way too separate from the colourful parts. Much more subtle transition needs to be introduced.

I also don't think any part of the beam should be completely transparent. Opaque would be better term, like some already stated.

Also I think that when you made the black parts transparent, the edge of the beam stayed too sharply defined. You can see colourful thin parts that were formerly between the black flecks are now protruding from the "core" of the beam, making a sharp straight line as an outer edge of the beam.

I suggest you save these for version [insert number here] and edit these further. Lessen the contrast, make the beam brighter in overall and make the transparent parts only partially transparent. In my opinion, these changes could make the beam look more like FS2 beam, but not completely.

Also, I haven't seen the beam in action (this PC doesn't run latest graphical goods properly at all), so I'm judging it solely on screenshot basis. It might be very different in-game.

On the other hand, The Babylon Project might be very interested in the progress of the work. They already do bear strong resemblance to the Shadow beams, as someone pointed out.

[Einstine909]

havent posted in awhile...
but i am still working on the beams

right now i am ripping the beams' centers out and putting them in there own pics

so instead of being one part it will have sections

also brightning them... each individualy

and the transparent parts should be what color instead?

[Herra Tohtori]

Well... I was thinking of something along these lines:



EDIT: Or perhaps like this.


This was a quick draft, and it's simple to make. The idea is that you preserve some transparency so that the intensity steadily grows inwards and at the core there is non-transparent, white bar of energy.

I put some uniform noise clouds into a selection, then coloured it green and made black transparent colour, and so the stars were visible through the now green cloud, which is visible at the edges of the beam... Then I put a white-black blilinear gradient on top of it, meddled a bit with brightness and contrast, then changed the black to transparent, and this was the result. This is how I would imagine the (FS2) beams to be - more or less.

[Snail]

The first one looks far better.

[Herra Tohtori]

I agree. The first one was better in overall of those two... however, I did some experimenting and ended up with these:







For some reason, the Vasudan beam became teh best of these ones. Possible reason is that it's easier to colour correctly, while the yellow colour has two colour components (red and green)... while the other beams only have one component - green for terran, red for shican and blue for AA-beam...

Now, if only I could figure a way to get these babies in-game and animated... I'll see if I can come up with correct method. First, I'll read through this thread again. Tomorrow, that is.

[Snail]

Wow those look great.

[Mars]

Looks good, now much better than the standard ones... and I know I'm nitpicking... could you just change the hue of the Shivan beam to be a little more red?

[Herra Tohtori]

What's wrong with nitpicking? We all want perfection (to varying extent).

More red Shivan beam... That's the real trick, isn't it? You see.. I've got a pretty well configured gamma settings on my Windows installation, so I don't see same as you do. My windows shows mid tones way darker than on default settings, so that beam looks quite good... unfortunaltely, normal screen settings show

a. much more and dimmer stars (which was not meant to be) and
b. the beam quite a bit lighter.

On red beam the effect is most notable.

Now I'm running on my Ubuntu (because of some weird networking problems my Windows freezes the connections quite often right now), and on this system it indeed shows the beams much more pale, or less vividly coloured, than on my Windows.

Set up the monitor the same way I have it, and the Shivan beam is more red.


Bah. Anyway - perhaps these things should be worked with default monitor and gamma settings so that those thousands who never bother to actually configure their screen colours would see the pictures like I would like them to...

The Vassie beam works best, currently. It doesn't seem to change that much under different gamma conditions, most likely because it's brightest of the lot by default. I'll see what I can do to the Shivan beam in particular...


EDIT: Here is, again, the Shivan beam - this time it hopefully looks better on that end... 8)

[Mars]

Much better... I love them all now

...Now I'm running on my Ubuntu...

Yeay!! (sorry, legally required to make a fool of myself every time a Linux distribution is mentioned.)

One more nitpick though.. the Terran and old Shivan beams seem to have white halos around the colored outer edge... was this intended? (I figure if this is going to replace the original effects it'd better look perfect)

[Herra Tohtori]

Heh...

What can you do, my Windows just doesn't seem to work as well at the moment...

Anyway, the white halos were not intended to be. They are remainders of a technique I first used, but I managed to circumvent it in the later ones. To be more technical, I used a 20 pixel selection softener to blend out the edges of the uniform clouds. Unfortunately, that also caused the gray cloud to bleed some amound around the selection, and later when I changed black colour of that selection transparent, the gray area around the selection was not black as it should've been, and... Well, whatever. I've got the technique pretty well figured out now, I can do this kind of beam in, say, 5 minutes with GIMP.


Now the big question. While these pictures of beams are entertaining enough, I would *sure* want to see them in-game. Just some things to clarify:

-are there some single files that I could replace with these? I only seem to find some *.ani files from adveffects VP, which contain animated beam textures...

-how do I make ANI files? I've heard of an ANI builder... does it come with Descent Manager package, or do I have to... aquire it from somewhere else?

-if there is some still picture beam "texture" that I can replace with these, I'll do so just to give it a quick test, how it looks and so on. But anyone can see that this beam style would not work very well unless it was animated... the flaming edges of the beam NEED to move. Though using the still texture could still give awesome screen shots, I would value the beams more if they looked good in-game, too.


Help appreciated, it would fasten up things quite a bit.

[Wanderer]

Skip .ani files (poor quality and waste memory) and use .eff files to create animations.. That is make animation frames as normal and name them aniname_0000... aniname_0010, where 0000 to 0010 is the framenumber. All files need to be of same type (.jpg, .tga, or .dds). Then create a textfile named  aniname.eff that consists of

Code: [Select]

$Type: DDS
$Frames: 11
$FPS: 25
Where type needs to match the filetype used for the ani (not very suprising), followed with number of frames (in example that would be 11) and finally the frames per second value.

Though you can 'animate' beam textures with still images using tile factor and translation option in the $BeamInfo:.

[Getter Robo G]

Been confused about movign beams for over two years... From those entries i THINK i got a small clue...

IS the tile factor dependant on beam TYPE??? meaning number has to be 0-4? Like if I last typed 60 (something) expecting it to fly vicked fast and it just sat there I shouldn;t be surprised yes? (more explination is needed in regards to what values stand for is actually do)...

Never heard of the negative thing for translation before.. Will try that sometime.