[Colonol Dekker]

Ok, so say on a primary weapon you're required to hold down the primary fire key, drawing power from reserves. The amount of power drawn affects the percentage of maximum damage dealt out and the scale of the projectile or its glow.
 
 
The more observant of you will realise that i'm ripping off the special weapon from the wing commander 4 dragon fighter.
 
Except with a change to the visible effect too.
 
 
Is it possible under SCP already?

[ChronoReverse]

Or the Fusion Cannon from Descent.  I also would like to see something like this 

[Nuke]

i dont see why they dont take the charge effect from beam cannons and make it a general effect, then depricate the value in the beam section. actually taking a look at the beaminfo from some random beam weapon (minus sections):

Code: [Select]

$BeamInfo:
+Type: 0 ;; 0 - 4 are valid #'s
+Life:   7.0 ;; how long it lasts once the beam is actually firing
+Warmup:   3700 ;; warmup time in ms
+Warmdown: 1500 ;; warmdown time in ms
+Radius:   180.0 ;; muzzle glow radius in meters
+PCount: 22 ;; particles spewed every interval
+PRadius: 1.9 ;; particle radius
+PAngle: 65.0 ;; angle of the random "cone" where the particles are generated
+PAni: particleexp01 ;; particle ani
+Miss Factor: 2.5 1.875 1.25 0.875 0.5 ;; magic # - higher == miss more (only really applicable to type 0 and type 3 beams)
+BeamSound: 178 ;; the looping beam-firing sound
+WarmupSound: 184 ;; associated warmup sound
+WarmdownSound: 188 ;; associated warmdown sound
+Muzzleglow: thrusterglow01 ;; muzzle glow bitmap
+Shots: 0 ;; only used for TYPE 3 beams
+ShrinkFactor: 0.1 ;; what percentage of lifetime where beam starts shrinking (0.1 == 10% life left)
+ShrinkPct: 1.8 ;; what percentage of max width we subtract per second

a lot of these values should be general weapon tags. beam type charging glows for example would make for some interesting weapon firing effects. theese in particular:

Code: [Select]

+Warmup:   3700 ;; warmup time in ms
+Warmdown: 1500 ;; warmdown time in ms
+Radius:   180.0 ;; muzzle glow radius in meters
+PCount: 22 ;; particles spewed every interval
+PRadius: 1.9 ;; particle radius
+PAngle: 65.0 ;; angle of the random "cone" where the particles are generated
+PAni: particleexp01 ;; particle ani
+WarmupSound: 184 ;; associated warmup sound
+WarmdownSound: 188 ;; associated warmdown sound
+Muzzleglow: thrusterglow01 ;; muzzle glow bitmap

they essentially discribe the charge/discharge effect mostly graphically but also the amount of time spent in chargeing and cooldown cycles. the effect can be further broken up into chargeup and charge down and can be used separately. for example you could use charge up for fusion cannon type weapons, and cool down for large howitzer type guns. enabling the effect for either just requires setting Warmup and/or Warmdown to a value greater than zero.

[Aardwolf]

Like the silly missile effect from the FS2 intro?

[Zacam]

We can only add one to to be available for the rest of the weapons. No deprecating of Retail parsing, or it breaks being able to load Retail data.

[Nuke]

We can only add one to to be available for the rest of the weapons. No deprecating of Retail parsing, or it breaks being able to load Retail data.

you dont need to depricate parsing, make it so the values can be parsed from either the beaminfo section or the general tags, but move the internal values from the beaminfo struct to the weaponinfo struct.

[Zacam]

Right. Copy it you mean so that it can be parsed from either.

[asyikarea51]

If this is what I think it is then a friendly +1, in particular I think it'd help the Thor fighter (the one with the big cannon up front) to some extent in making that cannon work "the way it should" (lack of a better phrase, sorry) while still being "balanced".

Not sure how I want to explain it without it turning into another-random-small-time-modder's-thread-jacking-diatribe-wall-of-text-explanation though, and then there's still that time I had with a fellow friend testing fighter-mounted beams in multiplayer...