Disabling LaserProjectile end cap rendering

[KDR_11k]

You've probably seen those ugly blocks on the ends of custom LaserCannon shots. For some reason they show up as garbage if you use an empty texture on them and the old trick of using a nonsense filename doesn't seem to work anymore either.

But why are we even struggling with that? Half the mods disable those lasercaps anyway so why don't we just add a way to never have those caps rendered?

I can make a patch but I'm wondering what the trigger logic should be. A certain value to texture2? A separate tag?

[Argh]

+100000

This was a bad idea from the beginning. If you really want caps on your beams, then you'll just make a 256 /64 bitmap, and show a capped beam. The other reason for keeping this has been on Beamlasers, however, I have yet to see one that doesn't arrive at the target in one frame, so... er, there isn't any reason to keep it for them, either, even though it's part of the current code.

It'd be trivial to remove this from Spring, and it wouldn't cause any serious backwards-compatibility problems. I'd be happy to provide all OTA modders who need a generic sprite for this with one...

[Snipawolf]

+1

[KDR_11k]

The caps make sense when the beam is moving towards/away from the camera since they're billboarded. They aren't drawn at some distance anyway though so most wouldn't even know they're gone.

[zwzsg]

Cap helps making shots looks good when they're travelling alongside the camera axis. So removing them completly isn't the answer.

But I noticed the caps get cut too early, in KP if I zoom out even a little the byte shots caps are cut and it's not pretty.

And sometimes the modder just doesn't want to bother with caps and having a straightforward way to have no caps would be good. I'd vote for no texture2 tag in the TDF -> no caps.

[KDR_11k]

The default laser texture needs caps though.

[rattle]

Or add a basic sprite only weapontype which can be either ballistic or linear or tracking (with or without additive blending).

[Turbo]

I don't know if this option wasn't available at the time of your writing, but I use:
LodDistance=0
So that only the center texture is used, even at the closest range :)