I do it because everything is fucking ugly and nobody else apparently has any sense of taste, so I have to do it myself. I'd just as soon not have to.
[/unrelated conversation] [flaming buildings ingame] Two words: DO WANT. Seriously, that's freakin' awesome.
Thanks so much. This is very helpful in combating fps issues (I play Empires on a laptop, it used to run great, but Orange Box gives it a few issues).
v2 is coming along nicely, I have a higher res smoke and fire texture, unfortunately it's more demanding (possibly moreso than the old smoke) so I'm not going to get it added officially like the first release since we have low end people and v1 looks fine. Screens on the way I'm also doing muzzleflashes to fuck with Chris Screens don't do it justice, it has a nice flash, some directed fire-ish things, directed smoke and it looks pretty nice. Like this: http://media.photobucket.com/image/muzzleflash/EGG-HEAD-OF-DOOM/NEWgunmuzzleflash.jpg The alignment is 90% correct, but there are cases where it looks bad due to alignment, but there's nothing I can do. There's also an issue with the shotgun pistol, it makes about 12 muzzleflashes stacked, the net effect is the smoke looking bad and the flash being super bright, but it's weirder that the shotgun pistol makes directed fire so... I've also tweaked the turret damage effect, I increased the sparks for demo purposes, you can see it spawns on random locations on the model rather than the centre of the turret/camera. Smoke still spawns at the centre though. There won't be as many sparks in the next release
Tiny fires just don't look right IMO. It's always bugged me since the first fire 'smoke' was released. They look random and out of place and tiny. Steadily increasing inferno would be far better.
I'm sorry but any particle effect larger than that will be ridiculously expensive or ugly unless it's an explosion (shortlived). The larger an effect the harder it is to make it cheap, which is why emp_silo's nuke never got finished. The placement of the fires is another thing however. And there's absolutely no way to scale it up as things are damaged further.
I tried the original version, but I honestly haven't noticed much of a performance boost. Oh well, I guess I'll keep them for a while, maybe I just haven't given them enough of a chance.
The more the building it's damaged the more smoke emitters is attached to it. IO think when the health decreases We could turn off old smoke and turn on the new one smoothly (at first small smoke, then big smoke, then smoke with flames, for example).
At the very least the cost is the same for a prettier effect. Sure I can make more smoke and fire because there's multiple emitters being switched on/off but I can't hook it up to make the effects larger or more spread out, there'll just be more smoke and fire. I tried to make it spawn fire and smoke across the entire model but it lagged and looked terrible. Without further code support this is as good as it gets. And I can do intermittent explosions but honestly I like fire and smoke better because you know whether it's being shot (rather than random explosions) and you can tell what needs repairing and what needs active defending etc.
I could possibly use control points to scale the effect up, there's no 'scale effect' command however. I could also get seperate effects put together and trigger each effect based on how damaged a structure is
So the building first smokes, then smokes more (...) and then when it's even more damaged it starts to burn? Sounds reasonable. Easy to code. What do other people think about this?
im ok with that because it sounds more logical. Imagined scenario: Starts to A smoke source at 80% health ... more smoke ... Deletes a smoke source(assuming flame has smoke built in) and Starts A flame at building 50% health. ... less smoke more flames (more flames means the flames get bigger too[when code is added to scale flames]) ... max flames at 10% health.
was just clarifying. Some people seemed a bit confused. Swapping in flames as damage goes up sounds like a really cool idea. So start with small amounts of smoke, and eventually the smoke has fires under them with enough dmg, saying that this building is screwed. And scaled flames. mmmm. Maybe even do a StarCraft in the red=constant dmg system? Oh, that's a gameplay idea, sry, wrong forum.
Believe it or not the art is important to gameplay. My muzzleflashes make ambushes easy to foil, my fire makes damaged structures easy to see at distance (the smoke goes surprisingly high) LTs have a huge advantage over AFVs due to their shape etc. And if I could I'd make buildings only catch fire after a certain point, but that's not currently possible. Talk to a dev and maybe it'll get leeway.
