Make the weapon animation proportional to weapon power

[willvette]

Make the weapon animation proportional to weapon power, as in powerful weapons are not small. I think each weapon module on a single grouping should increase the animation size (excluding pulse) by .5%, so a grouping of 100 Beam modules will have a beam that is 50% larger than normal.
Slave weapons also affect the size, having a cannon and missile slaves makes the ratio .25% while pulse slaves makes it .75%
Just a graphical idea not the highest priority (compared to improving turrets and trusters), also I'm guessing at the numbers to provide an example.

 

[Thalanor]

Agree; I think to make starmade combat feel as epic as starmade building, we need 1) exactly this (better yet: make weapon effects volumetric instead of billboarded tic-tacs) and 2) weapon computers giving a logic output when being fired, so they can be linked to fancy door/light animations on the weapons themselves. That would be so damn awesome.

 

[Poofer]

huge beams: blind the enemy. i love it.

 

[aceface]

yeah we really need this. i hate it that gigantic 1000000 block cannons have so small projectiles. they should be huge!!

 

[Ithirahad]

Agree; I think to make starmade combat feel as epic as starmade building, we need 1) exactly this (better yet: make weapon effects volumetric instead of billboarded tic-tacs) and 2) weapon computers giving a logic output when being fired, so they can be linked to fancy door/light animations on the weapons themselves. That would be so damn awesome.

Volumetric projectiles... I can hear my graphics card screaming in terror in my computer case even as it renders those two words. Other than that, yes, I agree.

 

[Thalanor]

It is actually less terrorful than that Ithirahad :D
Example: pulse weapons (except that noone uses them because of their extremely poor range). Pulses (both damage and push) are detailed spheres; yet an arbitrary number of them can be rendered on the screen at once. Volumetric weapon effects would require a similar (less detailed) ellipsoid for cannons and a "tube" for beams - both very feasible, and OpenGL has it that once you transferred the mesh of an object to the graphics card, you can re-paint it anywhere (even with different position and rotation!) for basically zero cost (as the GPU already knows the shape, and actually painting it is never the bottleneck).

Heck, I'd volunteer to code a kickass client-side particle/weapons/explosions effect system. Starmade is almost perfect, but with only a few days of coding in that department, combat would be borderline cinematic in quality.

 

[Ithirahad]

It is actually less terrorful than that Ithirahad :D
Example: pulse weapons (except that noone uses them because of their extremely poor range). Pulses (both damage and push) are detailed spheres; yet an arbitrary number of them can be rendered on the screen at once. Volumetric weapon effects would require a similar (less detailed) ellipsoid for cannons and a "tube" for beams - both very feasible, and OpenGL has it that once you transferred the mesh of an object to the graphics card, you can re-paint it anywhere (even with different position and rotation!) for basically zero cost (as the GPU already knows the shape, and actually painting it is never the bottleneck).

Heck, I'd volunteer to code a kickass client-side particle/weapons/explosions effect system. Starmade is almost perfect, but with only a few days of coding in that department, combat would be borderline cinematic in quality.

Oh, you meant "volumetric"like a model... I thought you meant something like true "volumetric" rendering, such as what would be used to make realistic fog - which is simply too damn complicated for current graphics cards to render. (Though volumetric effects for energy beams and blasts would look really cool if it was possible.)

 

[Thalanor]

Yeah, that would be a little overkill in a game with a 1m^3 block resolution (and indeed even worse for the poor GPU). Just saying that there is no technical reason we can't have solid weapon effects that have the visual punch worthy of their damage.

 

[Lecic]

This has been suggested since the days of oldsite. And, once again, I gotta say- support.

In the meantime, check out some of the mods in community content... I think they're by BearishMushroom? One of them increases the size of beams so that checkerboards of beams look like large single beams. Very nice.