Mmmm.... custom BeamWeapons

[Argh]

...and did I mention that the laser-end texture is both un-necessary for practical effects on Spring's likely playscales, and can be replaced with what I did here with very few ill effects on total performance?

JC... you muuuuuuuusstttt geeeeeeetttt the neeeeeew custom explosiongenerator code woooooooorking.

I will make you a nuke that will make SupCom fans cry, just give me the tools!

Next... time to make the Uber Anime Beam of Doometh. Then it's time to talk about everybody's favorite subject- "gibs" Ok, so in NanoBlobs, that would be, "what happens when a poor robot is reduced to its componants", also known as, "using the new code to make much nicer and FPS-friendly FX through Dirt, Smoke and HeatCloud textures".

Is the "beamweapons not registering hits on small things" bug fully resolved yet? My tests indicate that things seem to be quite a bit better, but I haven't been incredibly scientific about it- just watched several thousand things die in a pretty satisifying lightshow as usual.

[Das Bruce]

Concentrated win.

[Snipawolf]

Damn, those look fine

[Guessmyname]

Concentrated win.

I'm with him

[Argh]

Hmmmmm.

Found two big disappointments.

BeamLasers using custom graphics do not tile the graphic used for texture1. They really should. They don't need a texture2, either- that's clearly an oversight, since they arrive instantly.

Using tiling would allow us to have much better-looking beams without eating up huge amounts of texture space. The best looking one I've done so far is a whopping 768/32... which makes it not stretch and distort too badly to be used, but will just plain suck on performance. Until this oversight is corrected, I am going to use BeamWeapons, but not BeamLasers, because I do not want a choice between so much blurriness I should just use the default and having to use something so inefficient it shouldn't be in any serious video game

Given the way that this currently works, I was still able to make a neato effect, but again, this was pretty darn disappointing, really, and much more wasteful than it needed to be. With tiling, I could've made the same effect, but 32X smaller in total texture area, to put it into perspective. I think I'll try another tack with this and come back to this issue again after I've slept some.

Secondly, I got to observe BeamLasers imparting ImpulseFactor onto units they were hitting, even though I have set all of those variables to zero! I am pretty dismayed by that- I thought all of that stuff had been fixed, and now it's worse than previously. Drat

[Caydr]

I've confirmed that beamlasers-ignoring-impulsefactor thing... it's really bloody irritating. I've had to reduce all my mega-laser-of-DOOOOOM AoEs to 12 just to help REDUCE the effect. 12 AoE might still work fine, but I'd rather not have to reduce it to compensate for an engine bug. Not to mention that its ground scar is now the size of an anthill.

All in all though, I can't complain. This new version's FX system is a massive improvement.

[Argh]

The thing that's really irritating is that this is a new bug, on top of an old one, where they were still applying MapDamage, but you could make ImpulseFactor zero

At any rate... meh... at least beamweapons work right... and I'll soon test Missiles... I have a feeling that we may be able to do some really important stuff with them...

[Yeha]

Hmmmmm.

BeamLasers using custom graphics do not tile the graphic used for texture1. They really should. They don't need a texture2, either- that's clearly an oversight, since they arrive instantly.

If you want tiling textures you have to use a LargeBeamLaser.
There are times when the laser ending is visible on beamlasers, if they shoot straight into the air for instance, and texture2 make them not look completely cut off.