Particle Effect support and/or flare scaling

[GrOuNd_ZeRo]

I'd like to see Particle Effects for things like muzzleflashes, kind of expanding on the emit_SFX script tag, I've been talking to gnome about this and he agreed it would be rather neat, he also wanted to see a way to change the color of explosions and flares.

I'd also like to have a way to scale up the flare of a weapon or scale it down respectively.

I realise alpha wont be included anytime soon...if at all...this would be almost as good if not better.

[Sheekel]

I would like to see a nice effect for Aircraft fx. When following an aircraft in follow-up mode a little red hole for a jet engine isn't as neat as a real-time FX could be

[Maelstrom]

If planes had flaming exhaust, I would start acting like your avatar Sheekel. That would make such a nice effect, and from what i know (which isnt much, but anyway), all that would be needed is something similar to the nanolating, but different colours. That would (or could, havnt decided yet) look very nice.

[GrOuNd_ZeRo]

I had a thought...

Since SJ doesn't want to go to the trouble in coding alpha textures for units, what about sprites? the location and name would be determined by a reference point and an object name that is the same as the bitmap that could be placed in the textures folder, the file could be either TGA or BMP, black is alpha, much like the current flare bitmap.

The only problem with sprites is they contain no real 3D data, they are more like billboards IIRC.

But i'd really like to make custom flares for my units and OTA units, something that looks better than the tiny little flares in Spring, way too tiny for tanks and Big Berthas.

[zwzsg]

Uhm, Atlases already have nice flames effect. All you need is someone to add emit-sfx 0 from some_piece_at_the_rear; into the scripts of all the planes.

[FLOZi]

TACW does this already, though it doesn't look great in Spring, i imagine because it doesn't render them all the way down a vector as TA does.

[GrOuNd_ZeRo]

Yeah, I tried those too...explosions aren't placed well enough either so they are a no go...

I made a large cluster of emit_sfx points, looks ok but still not what I was aiming for...

[GrOuNd_ZeRo]

I just noticed that units are in Alpha when they are being qued, if we only can have seperate model section displayed in alpha I.E. piece named flare is alpha and piece cockpit is alpha, but not piece base for example, but the question, how will it work?

[Gnomre]

Ha, I didn't even think about it that way... yeah, why couldn't we adapt the code that previews structures on the terrain to be called from script?

set OPACITY(piecenum) to 0.5;

Have something like that in the script, and just make it apply the transparency value to each piece...

With that code you have already for building previews, it does exactly what we want... you'd just have to make it... work...

[GrOuNd_ZeRo]

see the muzzleflash? the background of that TGA is black, in Spring it's transparant!

so it is possible to make opaque textures, it's already supported...

I agree with Gnome on this, an opacity script tag would be awesome.

[mongus]

... omg... i have a unit idea... the mantis.. (this post suxors!!! woot!)
that isnt the real unit eh? only the "build spot" eh?