Explosions & Weapons

Jon Micheelsen · Post by **Jon Micheelsen** » 15 Aug 2005, 00:25

wow...talk about dedication.....or idle hands....

Well, I work with special FX for live roleplaying, TV and theater. The work is more of a wonderful hobby than "work", and my specialty, armouring and weapons crafting pay off rather nice

Check out my jobs website http://www.jotunheim.nu I'm btw. inside the red-eyed orc at intro picture

But, here is a sample of the explosion 2D frames I can do, all I need is someone to code the game to play them instead of the explo.bmp. Copy paste into "Address" to avoid Tripod banner...
http://jonmicheelsen.tripod.com/sitebui ... 00-011.jpg
The frames should be seperate bmp's, but tripod dosn't wanna upload them that way. Drop me a pm with an email and I'll send them in a zip to anyone interested in coding Spring to play them...

Considering the sounds, I need to know if I should stick to the same sample quality as TA or I hould do something better? High samplerate might lower system performance, so I don't know if it's worth it... Old TA, really runs bad if you increase sample quality just one step...

Jon M.

GrOuNd_ZeRo · Post by **GrOuNd_ZeRo** » 15 Aug 2005, 00:33

Hey nice work! what did you use to make those? I like it...Better than my explosions made in Paintshop Pro lol...

Don't worry about using higher sample rates, most games use 22khz sounds and in my mod, World Domination I use mostly 22khz sounds, works fine!

Unfortunatly I can't find my way around C++, I would gladly code it if I could, but one of the frames could be used right now.

Jon Micheelsen · Post by **Jon Micheelsen** » 15 Aug 2005, 04:48

Well, they are actually made in - "tadaaa!" - Paintshop Pro

Check out http://jonmicheelsen.tripod.com/ for 3 more explosions...

These are supposed to be used for Plasma weapons, wich I kinda like to have purple/redish projectiles, a colour of light that naturally only would occour from extreme temperature - thus the purple/redish flash... For different beam weapons I could make the flash in that particular beam colour...

Jon M.

AF · Post by AF » 15 Aug 2005, 04:54

hmmm shoudlnt be too hard to code in random explosions, preferably listed in the weapon def.

Jon Micheelsen · Post by **Jon Micheelsen** » 15 Aug 2005, 05:17

hmmm shoudlnt be too hard to code in random explosions, preferably listed in the weapon def.

Yes, I see entries like for instance:

animation=(Boom000_000.bmp,Boom000_001.bmp,Boom000_002.bmp,Boom000_003.bmp,Boom000_004.bmp),(Boom001_000.bmp,Boom001_001.bmp,Boom001_002.bmp,Boom001_003.bmp),
(Boom002_000.bmp,Boom002_001.bmp,Boom002_002.bmp,Boom002_003.bmp,Boom002_004.bmp,Boom002_005.bmp;

Just added a lightning hit animation for all the Zeus fans out there

Jon M.

hrmph · Post by **hrmph** » 15 Aug 2005, 06:07

Those look great! I think a lot of weapons could use the 'hit animation,' as you put it. Because a lot of times when units are firing up close it looks like nothing is coming out, when in fact the damage is being done. That blue lightning might look cool on top of a ship/building that has been paralyzed.. *drool* You could do some great things with those.

Maelstrom · Post by **Maelstrom** » 15 Aug 2005, 08:25

Instead of making lots of different colour anmations for the different coloured projectiles, couldnt we just make a greyscale explosion and colourise it to suit the particular weapon? it might look crap, i dunno, but its worth some thought.

Warlord Zsinj · Post by **Warlord Zsinj** » 15 Aug 2005, 11:14

Jon: I was wondering whether I would be able to use the last explosion animation you have in the link "http://jonmicheelsen.tripod.com/" (the lightning one) for the death explosion of the Sith Lord in my Star Wars conversion, SWTA? (With full credit to you, of course)

AF · Post by AF » 15 Aug 2005, 17:52

How does homeworld generate explosions, on those bombers you have the blue glow after they've fired that fades away, couldnt that be dynamically generated based on a few things such as weapon strength a linger value and a colour? Perhaps even weapons like palsma that arent going to explode on impact but behave mroe like waters been spashed and wrap around, could make for soem itnerestign explosions....... All speculation like...

Jon Micheelsen · Post by **Jon Micheelsen** » 19 Aug 2005, 02:44

Added four more explosions...

Warlord Zsinj: Send me a pm with an email I can send a zip containing the lightning bmp animations to...

Jon M.

Jon Micheelsen · Post by **Jon Micheelsen** » 20 Aug 2005, 03:22

Okay... I've begun looking on the sound fx, so far I've experimentet with the following:

Resamble original TA sounds, from 11025 8-bit to 22050 16-bit. Lightly distorting to "fill out" the higher quality, mixing in extra initial bass to "booms" to increase the dramatical aspect and reverbing it to sound more out-in-the-open. I also clean all superflous hiss, noise, clicks and pops, so the sound is crystal clear...

The current resampled result of the old Intimidator fire sound "XPLONUK3.wav" can be found on http://jonmicheelsen.tripod.com/
Try it loud with lots of bass on

Plans I have is to mix in extra fade-out to the booms as well as sample in the sound of falling debries, now that Spring actually displays a lot of rubble going airborne when rendering explosions - ofcourse more intense, the bigger a gun hitting...

More to come, when I've played around with the different "classes" of weapon fire, menu and unit selection sounds...

I suppose, I've changed the sounds enough to actually get them legal for free distribution, in the sense, as written somewhere else in the forum, the copyright can be legally broken by changing the original TA content beyond a certain percentage...

Jon M.

FireCrack · Post by **FireCrack** » 20 Aug 2005, 03:50

I'm realy not fond of those much at all, the colour is a metter of subjective opinion i suppose but i realy dislike the "fuzziness" of the glow.

Jon Micheelsen · Post by **Jon Micheelsen** » 20 Aug 2005, 04:40

Hmm... Can you be a little more specific FireCrack? I've now posted two pictures on my website showing how it most likely would look by replacing the explo.bmp with one of the first frames in the top explosion.

Perhaps it would look cooler if the glow weren't that yellow and red and more like the current explo.bmp, but I did it quite on purpose as someone mentioned they missed the reddish glow from the old TA.

I'll do an example of less reddish animation tomorrow, gotta go to bed

Jon M.

FireCrack · Post by **FireCrack** » 20 Aug 2005, 07:26

Well okay, the strange "frilly" pattern of the flash kinda bothers me, i guse that can be subjective, but they need touching up a bit, there seem to be a ew seams around the edges here and there where they dont fade nicely. For example, in the first frame of each of the purple ones, rather than the glwo smoothly fading out all the way, it just stops at a point leaving a strange boundry zone, mabye this is just an artifact of jpg compression though..

Anyways, other than that, it's just subjective, i prefer a more golden glow to the purple one you have now, and i prefer my glows to be circular.

IMSabbel · Post by **IMSabbel** » 20 Aug 2005, 11:25

I wondered about that, too.

This purple edge _looks_ like is was some artifact of alpha-blending above the standart magenta "no texture" d3d colour. It should intead go transparent into the background, not into pink...

Jon Micheelsen · Post by **Jon Micheelsen** » 20 Aug 2005, 19:27

Hmm, I'm currently redoing the colour balance of all the animations to get them less red/yellow and more golden. So, I've removed the other animations and added two pictures of the new colour balance as it looks in Spring...

Considering the flashes I think the explo.bmp that's already there does fine, but it would be nice to have a weapon tdf entry to change it for the specific weapons.
The randomly selected fire explosion animation should then be made to run just as the flash begins to fade.

Jon M.

Spring RTS Engine

Explosions & Weapons