[niffiwan]

While working on apngs, I noticed that since retail there's some code to allow engine glows use animations, but the code is disabled (i.e. it does some calcs then ignores the results). Given the presence of modelled thrusters, which provide a much better looking effect IMHO if you want it animated, I'm inclined to remove this code from ship.cpp (& lab.cpp where it was copy/pasted to), however I thought I'd put the question out there for the modellers/artists first;

Can anyone see any good reason to re-enable the use of animations for engine glows? (as opposed to removing the code entirely to avoid any future confusion?)

[DahBlount]

While I personally enjoy modeled thrusters, not every ship around uses them and doing the work to add them would be a PITA. I say fix the code so that animations actually work for those ships that currently do not have modeled thrusters. Who knows, it might bring out some positives of using bitmap thruster glows in addition to modeled thrusters?

I suppose this discussion also has some bearing on my work with revamping modeled thrusters such as allowing the use of multiple textures(of which the only gotcha is having to move the anims from data\effects to data\maps, I need to figure that out), allowing them to use replacement textures to declare afterburn anims, and working on a guide to making good thruster geometry.

[The E]

How long has this code been disabled?

[zookeeper]

It sounds like something that could potentially be very useful. Thruster glows and modelled thrusters are really completely different things used for very different-looking effects, and one can't replace the other. So yes, if/when it's just a matter of two one-liners like that, please do enable them!

[niffiwan]

How long has this code been disabled?

It was disabled in retail / the original source code release. And it seems like there's some support for this so I'll see about removing the commented out code and running a few tests.

[The E]

Good. Then noone will miss it if it's cut.

[Dragon]

Unless it's actually broken, there's no point in cutting it (and even then, it could be better to fix it rather than remove it). I say, animated thruster glows could be handy. Modeled thrusters aren't suitable for everything and probably won't become a standard anytime soon due to how much work they take.

[niffiwan]

I don't know if it's broken as is it was deliberately disabled by , it'll need testing to see if it's trivial to re-enable or not.

(and unless there's a good use case, which it seems there is _in this case_, there's definitely a benefit in cutting code which is doing nothing )

[The E]

Unless it's actually broken, there's no point in cutting it (and even then, it could be better to fix it rather than remove it). I say, animated thruster glows could be handy. Modeled thrusters aren't suitable for everything and probably won't become a standard anytime soon due to how much work they take.

The point of my remark was more along the lines of "If we cut this, it will not have an impact on anyone's experience of the game". Sure, it would be nice to have (and I would be curious to see what happens if this code is fixed and runs properly), but it's not like the subspace texture translation bug, where a feature from retail got lost when the render code was switched to shader-based rendering.

[jr2]

I wonder, did they use this in the GOTY DVD release of freespace 2?  IIRC that had AB trails.

[Spoon]

If this code was reenabled, what would it do/allows us to do?

[Dragon]

Presumably to use .ani/.eff FX for thruster glows instead of static bitmaps.