Beef Up Cannon Animations

[Edymnion]

Missile graphics are generally pretty good, when something shoots a missile at me I generally know it because I can actually see it. Same with beams, if I'm in range of a beam emitter, I can see when its firing at me.

Cannons though? I'm sure I've seen something with cannons shooting at me, but I honestly can't remember any specific time I've gone "Hey, I just saw cannon shells fly past me, I'm under attack!"

Could we increase the size/visibility of cannon shots? Maybe to something more like the pulse phasers from Star Trek?

 

[aceface]

i have been pushing for this for a while. but they want to do it when its beta.

 

[CyberTao]

Cannons are just too fast mate. I'm not even joking, they fly at 10x server speed by default, and on some servers it's almost impossible to even register seeing a shot. I once had someone firing at it, and it just looked like a flashing light. (Movies also use a lot of motion blur for fast moving things iirc, which isnt all that nice).

But yeah, Just making them bigger might not solve everything. Maybe a trail?

 

[Edymnion]

Yikes, no wonder I don't remember ever seeing shells fly past, server max speed on mine is 300 m/sec.

But yeah, we need something to make the shots more visible, and I'd really like to see that something before beta, mainly because I don't know how many people are actually USING cannons right now to be able to get a fair bead on them.

I mean, I for one don't use them as main guns. I don't even put them on my main ship at all. All of my cannons go onto turrets because the AI can do the calculations to lead the shots perfectly every time (against ships, anyway), so I let them do it. When I need non-missile attacks on my main ship, I always use beams because I can freaking hit things with them.

I'm thinking if it goes until beta, it may be too late for a cannon overhaul, but I don't think we'll get a cannon overhaul until more people can provide better feedback on the cannons. Which I question if they will do when you can't actually see what you're doing with them.

 

[Lecic]

I'd like cannon shells to be larger in size if they do more damage. Perhaps even an explosive effect on particularly large cannon shells.

 

[lupoCani]

I think a glow/trail seems the most reasonable option.