[Fury]

Gotta say that the 2D looks better.
*disables 3D shockwaves in his launcher*

[Snail]

Well to each his own I guess.

*me turns on mv-cell*

[Commander Zane]

You still have an mv-cell?

[Snail]

You still have an mv-cell?

nah, not really. It was a fun concept though.

[Nighteyes]

the thing is, I want to use the 2d one for small shockwaves like missiles, especially torpedows, u never want 2 c them as a flat shockwave, while capships should use the 3d one as its much higher rez
so.... who is making me the flattened pof file?

[Dragon]

I have an idea which may help you or not, Nighteyes.
None of shockwave textures have alpha channel (they're all DXT1), so try removing it from your maps.
Also, on advanced version the wave itself is a glow texture, while the main one is the flash you see before wavefront starts to expand.

[Aardwolf]

I wouldn't be surprised if it were fairly trivial to mimic the old cell-shaded effect using the existing shader system... before Hery came along, even...

[Nighteyes]

I have an idea which may help you or not, Nighteyes.
None of shockwave textures have alpha channel (they're all DXT1), so try removing it from your maps.
Also, on advanced version the wave itself is a glow texture, while the main one is the flash you see before wavefront starts to expand.

there is no alpha on my shockwave textures... it renders correctly its just the pof model that needs adjusting...

[Nighteyes]

pof model fixed by me and converted by FUBAR, now it looks good thanks for the help guys!

By gbtf67 at 2010-01-04

By gbtf67 at 2010-01-04

[Thaeris]

You still have an mv-cell?

nah, not really. It was a fun concept though.

I really wish they'd bring that back. That has to be one of the most interesting visual features I've ever seen for FSO. 

[-Norbert-]

Kinda reminds me of the spell Holy from Final Fantasy. ^^

[Titan]

You still have an mv-cell?

nah, not really. It was a fun concept though.

I really wish they'd bring that back. That has to be one of the most interesting visual features I've ever seen for FSO. 

What is it?

[The E]

It was a rudimentary implementation of cell-shading. It was removed from the source quite some time ago (IIRC, 3.6.9 didn't have it). mv_cell was a package of textures optimized for that.

[Commander Zane]

In other words to actually give you an idea of how it looks it would look like XIII, Borderlands, Robotech Battlecry, having the exaggerated outlines on shapes and cartoony look.

[Thaeris]

Enabling that feature for cutscenes could be a lot of fun. TAP might actually benefit from that... I've never played any of the HW games, but I have watched a few of the cutscenes on YouTube. 

[Hades]

Well, the cutscenes are 2D and actually do not look anything like what's in game, none of the textures in both games are even remotely like MV cell.

[Nighteyes]

Just a thought I had in mind regarding spherical shockwaves... if we can make the game display both types of shockwaves (2D and 3D) at the same time, we will have one shockwave always facing the player and a 3D one that the player can pass through... can look pretty nice and would resolve completly the paper thin shockwave syndrome... what do you guys think?

[Herra Tohtori]

If your shockwave is a planar projection of a spherical shockwave, you should use a planar texture for it.

In other words, if you have rendered the shockwave animation from an actual 3D explosion, you should use the 2D shockwaves to get it in FS2_Open. Those are always seem from normal direction, so they will look best in the game, much better than disk-shaped 3D shockwaves.

Now, if someone actually makes a spherical in-game expanding shockwave model with distortion and maybe some sort of fake fresnel effect/glow, then it would probably look better than the 2D shockwaves.

[Fury]

Agreed, shockwave effects in current mediavps looks much better in 2D than 3D.

[Nighteyes]

only problem IMO is that the 2D shockwaves are limited to 512x512 textures... that looks jaggey on the really big shockwave explosions... on the other hand the 3D shockwaves are MUCH more crisp, as they use (512x512)x4 textures... now, if we could make the pof of the 3D shockwave to always face the camera, I would be a happy man