[General Battuta]

It's not as irrelevant as it might seem. If you jump a corvette with a destroyer, stronger per pulse damage is more likely to take it out instantly, but it might just survive the weaker pulse and inflict some damage to the destroyer or warp out.

We did an analysis on this and it's irrelevant for basically every ship in FreeSpace. The differences in per pulse damage aren't enough.

[Qent]

A BGreen also has a higher raw damage than a BVas or LRed, so intuitively it would be look bigger. If MattTheGeek wants to lump primitive containment technology on top of that, then it would be even bigger.

In terms of balance they still suck though. The damage per pulse thing is probably more relevant to the SGreen.

[TrashMan]

one can ALSO interpret it as the beam having so much power behind it that even the finest control struggles with it.

Which means Terrans also have a poor control technology, since even their finest ones can't control correctly a beam which is much less powerful than its Vasudan and Shivan equivalents. So its another argument in favor of poor beam technology.

Meh..It looks like raw, destructive power. Reminds me of the Macross main gun...and the main gun from the Yamato...and the main gun from the Starship Operators.

[Hades]

That's the current Bgreen size coming out of a button of the Colossus.

Terslash coming out of another.

See, the thing with the Terslash is, it has to be scaled to be able to fit on the smallest ships, like the Deimos. Make it big enough to be bigger than the button and it won't fit at all on the Deimos.

[Qent]

Looks good. But what about user-made ships that expect it to be retail-sized?

[Mongoose]

Honestly, I'd rather have them looking ridiculously big on small ships yet okay on the big ones than looking good on small ships yet as wimpy as those screenshots are.  I always got a kick out of beam glows swallowing up cruisers, anyway.

[Hades]

Thing is, it's not really fair to put cruiser/corvette and destroyer beams on a juggernaut that at the least thee times longer than. the LRBGreen and BFGreen do look right on it though.

I'll get some screens of the Fenris, Deimos, Hecate firing their normal beams and the Colossus firing the LRBGreen.

Here they are:


LRBGreen


Bgreen

Terslash

[Hades]

And here's the latest revision of the file. Same place as always, overwrite, etc.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[MatthTheGeek]

Tiny beams are still tiny. Thank god I know enough tabling to overwrite those if they ever end up in the MVPs, which I surely hope they don't.

[Hades]

I have to say, that's pretty surprising considering you appear to lack the capacity for constructive criticism.

[Psychonaut]

I´ve really pimped up the normal MVPs with lots of custom explosions, shaders, the extensive use of the exp_flash-script etc. So everything is over the top and i really like it that way. But IMHO the "tiny" beams are a step forward for the overall visual appearance of the game. Especially if you use the beam-piercing effect, which is now more noticeable.
Right now i´m at work, but i´m looking forward to test the new .tbm at home. Keep up the good work.

 

[headdie]

how does this sound?  Have a setup where the beam muzzle flash and beam width are set as normal in the weapon table but then be able to list scaling factors somewhere like Objecttypes.tbl so if the beam is fired from a ship with a cruiser flag it applies one scale factor but a corvette flagged ship will apply a different (larger) scale factor to those values.

[Kolgena]

I'm not sure I would like that. Having a Lilith fire off something SRed sized that OHKOs cruisers doesn't make much sense.

That, and it's easier to tell exactly what beam is being fired if the sizes remain consistent across ships.

I think the Terslash has quite a bit of room to be bigger. Personally, I always envisioned it to be near the same size of the BGreen, and it seems to me that the Deimos could still mount slightly larger beam/beam glows. The problem now is (judging from the Hecate above), the terslash looks to be about 2x as thick as an AAA, and that's kinda impotent looking.

[TacOne]

I agree; the terslash looks a tad too thin.

The others look good though.

Personally, I like the thinner beams. Firstly because they look less silly, and secondly because they feel more scalpel-like that way. Neat little cuts that cut ships to pieces .

[Psychonaut]

.....secondly because they feel more scalpel-like that way. Neat little cuts that cut ships to pieces .

That is exactly, what i wanted to say ... but was not able to translate 

[Droid803]

The TerSlash in particular is much too small on the Hecate's WTFHUGE beam dish (and the Colossus's WTFEVENHUGER beam dish). Screw the Deimos for having such a tiny turret. I'd rather have it look slightly strange (too big) on one ship than dinky and underwhelming on three ships.

BGreen could stand to get a bit bigger, seeing as it never had a size issue to begin with, not a big deal either way.

[Hades]

The default BGreen's actual beam was wider than the Aeolus and it doesn't even kill them in one hit, so yes, it did have a size issue.

The Hecate's beam dishes are all a bit too big anyway, just huge targets to destroy, really.

[Droid803]

...the Retail BGreen was that big?

Hm, yeah...maybe I (or someone) should go shrinkitize the TerSlash turrets on the Hecate or something...
It doesn't make much sense for them to be as big as a BGreen turret anyway.

[headdie]

The problem is that changes the size of the object making it more difficult to hit

[Droid803]

Right now they're actually rather larger than the turrets on the retail one, I don't see that being too much of a problem (in fact it might even be better)