[Davin]

Actually, that Orion there is not the Galatea... its the Legion

Okay, I know the Bastion was used in FS2 to collapse a jump node, how did the Galatea meet its fate?  I forget.

The lucy did actually blow up the Galatea, just not in that specific battle.

[jr2]

Ah, now I feel a little better. 

[SadisticSid]

Ok, well thanks to that scraping explosionless beam picture that Davin has provided.
Here's the normal.

Here's with an imaginary beam hit affect i was thinking about. I did my best to make the colors conform to the new beam. And i took bobbaus beam glow affect and made it the impact affect with a lot of tweaking to it. Modified beam glows would work great for beam impact affects, i actually wanted to use the beam glow in that screenshot to make a beam hit affect, but i couldn't find a copy of it around, so i used bobbaus.

I did my best to incorporate a beam affect with like some crude lighting around it. So it hits, looks cool, and it glows. I of course used gimp to do this imaginary affect, changed the perspective of the beam impact affect to better conform to the side of the hull of the sathanas (i did that pretty horribly). Preserving the roundness wasn't too easy, so it's slightly oval shaped, but it's good enough. After that i think i did a pretty good job at making the beam hit affect colors from bobbaus beam glow affect to conform to his new terran beam in this shot.

But anyway, this is a beam affect the beams really need. It shows the beam beating with intensity against the hull of a sathanas while you get to watch the beam hit the hull and sort of spread out a little bit, sort of like what the flame of the blowtorch i posted does when it hits a surface. Shoot me for this, but i didn't mean to stir people up about shaders and the beam turning the hull of a ship red or orange wherever the beam got done hitting. This sort of makes the beams look more menacing, but anyways, imagine this along with the scraping explosions affect.

EDIT: I may have made the beam hit thingy too big for this rather small and  non-uber beam blasting the sathanas.

I don't know if anyone remembered a build DTP made before the SCP was formed (it was just after the source release), but that looks very similar to the effect he made as a secondary effect. I think a circular glow - like laserglowxxx - was drawn on top of the explosion ani but was done faster so slasher beams left a green/yellow/red trail of what looked like plasma burning across the hull. The trouble with trying to replicate the effect is that the explosion ani is only drawn 5-10 times a second, so fast moving slasher beams moving across a ship's hull with your effect would only leave a few impacts. Kudos anyway.

[Raven2001]

in fact that problem you described was solved as well in that build, because the guy that made it also made the explosions to repeat themselves faster

[Flipside]

Well, impact effects like that, I would have thought, would be possible if the damage decal code is optimised. You could have it so the beam scrapes away the top panelling to reveal understructure. With some clever bumpmapping, it could look really effective.

Of course, the downside being that we can't do that, yet*, but I think this is the sort of stuff the SCP guys will be looking at for 3.7

*Well, yes, we can, but last time I checked, the decal code wasn't running nearly as effeciently as Bobb would have liked.

[S-99]

Well good thing i didn't make a fakey image of a damage decal. If this were a slashing beam, then the impact affect would stay with the beam at all times especially when it moves across the hull. Like everyone said if you want the hull red super heated spots after the beam is over with then there's potentious shaders.
The idea i represented is not supposed to be shown off as a damage decal. It's just supposed to be a justifiable way to show off what a beam looks like when it hits a ship, as opposed to the unmodified image that doesn't have the fakey beam.

I don't know if anyone remembered a build DTP made before the SCP was formed (it was just after the source release), but that looks very similar to the effect he made as a secondary effect. I think a circular glow - like laserglowxxx - was drawn on top of the explosion ani but was done faster so slasher beams left a green/yellow/red trail of what looked like plasma burning across the hull. The trouble with trying to replicate the effect is that the explosion ani is only drawn 5-10 times a second, so fast moving slasher beams moving across a ship's hull with your effect would only leave a few impacts. Kudos anyway.

From what i read here besides going off on damage decals here, that an effect of what i proposed could be put into the game, but like i said. Regardless of the damage decal ****, this sounds like a step in the right way the way this old build worked(current damage decals in scp are **** currently...then again i would think that you didn't define what you meant by the word decal).

[Herra Tohtori]

I understand decals as tingsies that attach themselves to the hull, altering the look of the texture to be scorched with intense heat. Though cool if they worked properly, they themselves wouldn't be the answer to the problem of making the beam's end look like the plasma is spreading a little at the point of impact.

If I haven't seriously misunderstood something, then what we're talking about here is a way to increase the amount/size/shape of explosion animation spawning in the point where beams hit, so that slashing beams would generate those animations closer to each other, forming a continuous line of them instead of current gapped effect, which kinda reminds a dot line from those "connect the dots" pictures for pre-school children... except the points are explosions.

[Bobboau]

I don't know what you people are talking about with the "current decals in SCP" being "****", they are non-existant, the code was comented out many months ago. I was waiting untill we had an internal geometry upgrade before I tried fixing them cause with the current geometry it's imposable to make them fast enough.

[Darklord42]

Ok Installed the latest effects pack by moving evreything into there respective folders but i get these errors.

Error: bob-wep.tbm(line 196:
Error: Required token = [#End] or [$Name:], found [#Beam Weapons]
in weapon: BVas.

File:J:\src\cvs\fs2_open_3_6_9.final\code\Parse\PARSELO.CPP
Line: 659
[This filename points to the location of a file on the computer that built this executable]

Call stack:
------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------Error: bob-wep.tbm(line 49:
Error: Required token = [#End] or [$Name:], found [+Length:               1500               ]
in weapon: BGreen.

File:J:\src\cvs\fs2_open_3_6_9.final\code\Parse\PARSELO.CPP
Line: 659
[This filename points to the location of a file on the computer that built this executable]

Call stack:
------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------

Error: bob-wep.tbm(line 50:
Error: Required token = [#End] or [$Name:], found [+Texture:            TbeamAE      ]
in weapon: BGreen.

File:J:\src\cvs\fs2_open_3_6_9.final\code\Parse\PARSELO.CPP
Line: 659
[This filename points to the location of a file on the computer that built this executable]

Call stack:
------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------

Error: bob-wep.tbm(line 51:
Error: Required token = [#End] or [$Name:], found [+RGBA Inner:         0 0 255 255       ]
in weapon: BGreen.

File:J:\src\cvs\fs2_open_3_6_9.final\code\Parse\PARSELO.CPP
Line: 659
[This filename points to the location of a file on the computer that built this executable]

Call stack:
------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------

Error: bob-wep.tbm(line 52:
Error: Required token = [#End] or [$Name:], found [+RGBA Outer:         0 0 255 255       ]
in weapon: BGreen.

File:J:\src\cvs\fs2_open_3_6_9.final\code\Parse\PARSELO.CPP
Line: 659
[This filename points to the location of a file on the computer that built this executable]

Call stack:
------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------

ect....... There are quite a few more.
 I know that it must be something on my end but what?
And why are there more then one copy of these tables?  I tried removing them but that did nothing.  And what is the exp.zip for?

[neoterran]

yes, remove +Length line from the tbm whereever you find it

[Bobboau]

it would probly be better to remove the section than just that tag.

[Darklord42]

I removed the whole sections but still am getting simmilar errors. Could someone fix the tbms and post working ones for us computing degenerates? 

[Cobra]

I believe the one I posted works if you delete the length sections.

[Darklord42]

oh I can't find it. Did it have all the latest stuff that Bob put in?

[Cobra]

Huh. I thought I posted it, I guess I didn't.

[Darklord42]

could someone email me the working tbm files? My Email is [email protected]

[mnftg64]

Any idea when we might be able to see a final build for 3.6.9?

[jr2]

It's already out... just some features require a newer build than 3.6.9, and these builds are experimental... or did you mean MediaVPs 3.6.9?

[mnftg64]

What build will work, when I use Bob's, my cutscenes are green.

[jr2]

Well, you can have more than one build in your FS2 directory; you just have to choose the one you want to run from the Launcher.  So, for Bob's effects, I think you need Bob's build.  For the rest of the time, you can use 3.6.9 -  IIRC, any "scripting build" aka "HEAD" build will work.. I guess.  Someone who knows what they're talking about wanna help mnftg64?