*edit* redundant post

I will give these a try Steve! 🙂 One of the things I have come across time and time again are people who are not happy with the weapons in the game. I try to explain that patience is required 😉

EDIT: Tried out the new lasers with an altercation with the police. Certainly an improvement 🙂

glad you like them! I may be able to offer further improvements, these files will add position light graphics to fix the conflict with the smoke.

you will need to replace one lua file - data/sub_models/Pos_lights and add the poslight texture to the textures folder.

EDIT - see first post, zip contains all updated files

Some thoughts.

Lasers. Fyi, the green the enemy's 10MW laser, the yellow my 4MW laser. Its not as obvious from this screenshot, but they really are incredibly faint when moving. The default red is the same. Is that something that could be taken care of with colour changes, or are the textures too transparent?

This is the new beacon texture. Up close its obvious that its a billboard. Can we do anything about that? (I don't remember if the old ones are like that).

Smoke looks fine - better than before.

Btw, I'm happy to make code changes to support effects that might not be possible by just tweaking textures, but I will need guidance on what you want it to look like.

For anyone that wants it I've imported these to my new-laser-smoke-textures branch.

impressive as always 😎

im liking it after seeing screen shots , an enhancement of sorts

Like 🙂

I tangentially jabbered about this on the mailing list, but every light source should produce a similar glow/flare. Now the craft lights are round blobs, landing pad lights are little five-point star things and lasers are yet another type, as if the camera lens changed for each effect. So in that regard the original nondescript blob lights were more consistent.

the beacon one i made is ***** feel free to change it to a "blob". if you copy poslight and rename the copy beacon.png you'll have a more consistent result, or copy the old smoke.png and rename it to beacon.png, then it will look just like the old days.

i will render some nicer flares/glows some time. Important thing there is that you have another choice

As for the laser bolts, they would look a lot better if we could have a bright hotspot in the middle, if we dissect the perfect effects laser bolt, we have a very bright, solid, near white core. Then the brightness will fall off along with the opacity and its at this point we get more of the colour of the weapon.

It could be done with some gradient effect, but simpler just to have bitmap control of the RGB, so a texture would need to be introduced for each weapon type (which is nice because it allows for more effects)... Graphically this is not a difficult task, i'd do it if the textures can be accomodated in code. If they were constructed in a more industry standard way we could probably get more consistent results, this would involve having a new model and a new texture set, its not, from a modelling POV, difficult to accomplish... its how i did the engine effect on the xr2 ravenstar.

(and btw i also want to tackle the engine effect in pioneer and make it more like the xr2's there some time, make it more ethereal and gaseous and less like solid shaded polys.)

further improvements to the smoke, give the smoke some random spin, so they aren't all obviously the same texture repeated over and over

also give the smoke some random size, make some 4 times the size they're currently illustrated at, and everything inbetween.. also, again, control over the RBG for every pixel of the smoke texture would be great, again this means adding support for another map, not sure if any of this can be accomplished through LUA.

I think thats it for now;)

Nice agenda of visual improvements! Not too hard to achieve (I hope) but the results can be great, specially the thruster effects.

Nice Orbiter pic. As an Orbiter fan I ever have been surprised about how good looking a dx7 renderer can be, (apart the astounding physics engine, of course.)

Could exist in pioneer the spectacular smoke effect on atmospheric flight that Orbiter has?, or something similar less smokey?

And one wish: The lasers and weapons might be thrilling. Sound and effect must show the power of destruction of the weapon, not just a sense of lighting on a lantern 🙂 . One thing I love is the weapons in Miner Wars, as an example.

the smoke effects in orbiter have little to do with dx or ogl, its essentially just a particle stream, and pioneer already supports smoke particles.

what you can't do with the smoke is give it a colour based on a bitmap as you can in orbiter, which would make it easier to achieve a realistic effect.

(or at least, i can't figure out how to do it, if anyone can help....)

other than that, i agree smoke trails (i assume this is what you're talking about?) would be great... Even classic Frontier had smoketrails from missiles and damaged ships.

(And even though this type of rocket engine might not produce any smoke, it may well leave a trail behind in certain atmospheres)

for the smoke trails in space, if it was setup to emit particles in a random direction for a certain amount of time, after a ship had taken hull damage... and so you emit the particles constantly in that direction with a set, kinda high velocity, then you would really get an interesting plume effect.

another nice effect would be a hull heating effect. I did this with the XR2 by making a very low poly model which fitted over the hull of the ship, painted with hot red re-entry effect. Then doug coded it so the mesh would start to fade in as the hull heated up further and further until it was red or white hot.

Yes, I was speaking about Smoke trails. And I agree, the hull heating effect would be great! 🙂

Both are very effective and "physical" effects.

Greetings

I like the direction this thread is going 😎 Glowing hulls with re-entry! 😮 Yes I know not yet, but still, even talking about it! 😀

Certainly all those years of frustration on the lack of a good solid space sim, is now paying off, all those ideas that were fermenting away were just waiting to be unleashed from the community. It may take years but with ideas like I have seen in this thread and others, Pioneer is going to be awesome when it finally reaches version 1.0 😉

coolhand,

you set the goal very high, hm?

that's o.k (i hope i can follow that)

Your doing just fine so far Gernot 😉

potsmoke, can i depress you further and tell you thats my old stuff, the new version looks like this:D

coming soon for Orbiter...

please check out page 1 for revised texture sets.

Is it a new texture or a new model? Is the XR2 Ravenstar 1.3 version?

Oh, and I have tested the new lasers, good job. I like them a lot.