Looks great - that's just the kind of effect we need here.
There is a problem though in that there are two sharp clipping planes visible before about frame 100. I'd rather not go through and blur that out or otherwise conceal it if it's faster for you to do in the source file? <See attached images>
One more thing (and remember this is not a criticism, just the state of affairs in FS modding!) - for official MVP releases it's
very important that we keep framecounts in all animations to an absolute minimum we can get away with. FS stores every graphic file it uses in a single array which has a limited size of 4750 slots. Into that array you need to fit
every single frame of every loaded animation and image, including main hall and all interface, impact effects, shield hits, explosions, shockwaves, animated glowmaps, actual ship textures, background graphics, thruster glows, particle effects, warpmaps, missile trails - everything. AFAIK once an instance of the game breaches that limit, you begin getting texture corruption, where the game looks up the wrong textures for various things, resulting in stuff like ships being given a sun graphic as a texture or something equally bizzare.
I'm by no means saying we need to limit ourselves to the ~47 frames the original effects, but a single effect that jumps from 47 frames to 518 is excessive - and having just 3 effects doing that will straight away takes up a third of the total available slots.
I'm also not saying don't release full length, full quality stuff as you just have because doing that makes the FSU teams job much easier in scaling the framecount and memory footprint of the effect to work best with the Standard and Advanced packages. (Also the full length versions could be quite helpful for making pre-rendered cutscenes.
)
So yeah, basically keep up the good work and don't be concerned if we shrink stuff to get it into the MVPs.
[attachment deleted by evil Tolwyn]
