Beam weapons

[Andon]

Except it can't be done, and it sends excessive amounts of packets to and from the server

[madpeople]

QUOTE (Andon @ Jul 31 2008, 05:47 PM) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0nKEe5umlk

is that gun damaging the miner through the base?

QUOTE (Andon @ Aug 1 2008, 01:29 AM) You can't have partial transparency. Either there is color there, or it's completely transparent. You might be able to dither it some, but it would be difficult

i've seen dithering done, but it was very coarse dithering. try a dithered texture which is mapped so that the dithering is very small (repeat the texture over the length of it)
weapon sprites transparency seems to be based on brightness rather than keyed transparency

QUOTE (fishbone @ Aug 1 2008, 02:19 AM) oooooohhhhh*gets out of seat*
hat about a thin "helical coil" that goes around the tube and then is repeatedly replaced by helicical coils either wrapping in a different directions or moving relative to the core to give it a "ghostbusters" ray effect.

adaven has done a helix cannon before, it looked really cool (used a texture with a red and blue light spots on opposite sides of the centre and firing lots of them really really quickly)

QUOTE (Andon @ Aug 1 2008, 02:35 AM) Not going to happen. Only lights that Alleg supports are those blinking ones on ships. And I can't time their blinking.

apparently you can change their frequency etc, or rather the code is there to allow it to be changed, we just don't have the tools to say we want it anything different from default

QUOTE (Andon @ Aug 1 2008, 02:58 AM) You can't animate tetures

you can animate gun sprites, but not model textures.

you do it the same way you make animated explosions.

one thing i noticed though is that the order the frames are played in isn't 1,2,3,4,5...
my test texture was actually the frame number in each frame, what i saw was something like 1,7,5,8,4,13

[bkchm]

Also, theres a beam weapon on EoR (Rtc)...Rix ab. It has pretty good looks.

[Andon]

the Rix beam on EOR is a sprite.

And yes, the beam was damaging the miner through the base.

[mesial]

Looks like madpeople just addressed the issues that I was going to point out.

Like gun sprite CAN be animated.

And as far as transparency... the colored HUD is transparent as all HUD's are. I know that is different than this subject, but that doesn't mean it's impossible.

[Makida]

How about a single particle with a very very high speed and some sort of trail? Like, missiles leave an exhaust-like trail. You'd just need one tiny, perhaps invisible particle that, once fired from a gun, can basically get anywhere within its range in a split-second, and some very faint barely-noticeable trail that lingers behind it to suggest a "beam." It wouldn't look quite like a solid 3-D object a la star-trek-style phasers, but it would have the effect of a beam weapon, and hey, Allegiance can bend the rules. >_> If anything it'd be more realistic.

[Andon]

Particles do not leave trails or exhaust.

Having super-fast projectiles generally does not work. I've tried it before, and if Alleg registers that it is there at all (A lot of times it would simply not register the particle as impacting as it was going too far between updates) then it will still jump through objects.

I'm thinking of making a high-speed (not super-fast) 'stream' of physical projectiles. A lot of the effect of the beam is the fact that it is a projectile and not a sprite. You can make a projectile look and do a lot more than a sprite. The issue is making the stream fire fast enough to not 'hose' or 'whip' like Nix lasers do, but not having it go too fast and not registering with the server right

[beeman]

QUOTE (Andon @ Aug 4 2008, 11:47 PM) Particles do not leave trails or exhaust.

Having super-fast projectiles generally does not work. I've tried it before, and if Alleg registers that it is there at all (A lot of times it would simply not register the particle as impacting as it was going too far between updates) then it will still jump through objects.

I'm thinking of making a high-speed (not super-fast) 'stream' of physical projectiles. A lot of the effect of the beam is the fact that it is a projectile and not a sprite. You can make a projectile look and do a lot more than a sprite. The issue is making the stream fire fast enough to not 'hose' or 'whip' like Nix lasers do, but not having it go too fast and not registering with the server right

Can you have the weapon shoot both a visible projectile and an invisible - where the visible would fire at a very fast but do no damage and the invisible would be slower and exhibit the hose or whip effect, but it would do damage? sorta the idea behind a tracer bullet - wait...did someone post this idea previously in this thread? If so, sorry.

[Andon]

Can't be done - it would require multiple guns.

[madpeople]

i should point out that it appears that if you use a model for the weapon projectile, that it seems to use the cvh for the collision (though it could just be a sphere the same radius as the projectile)

i tried seeing what part of a projectile shaped like an asteroid my ship needed to get hit by for it to register as a hit, i found any part of it will do