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The new update improved the weapon system a lot and made it much more fun to play around with weapons, thought the weapons still do not give you that special WOW AWESOME feeling. I know the game is in early state, so regard this as something for either now or later. This is going to be two related suggestions in one, about both beam weapons and cannons to start with.
Small warning: this post is going to be fairly long.
Beam weapons
A lot can be done to make these much more interesting:
-You can add a charge-up that scales as the array grows in size
-The beams could have a charge-up sound, a looping sound, and a shut-down sound
-The beams themselves could scale up in size when the array becomes larger (I'm sure this is planned)
I want to go in more detail about the charge-up.
So how would this work?
Basically, beam weapons would require a certain amount of time to collect the energy required to make them fire. This amount of time would scale with the size of the array, but rather not in a linear fashion.
The scaling graph would look similar to a logit function:
Disregard the numbers and characters entirely, it's about the shape!
This graph would imply that smaller arrays would barely notice any charge-up (assuming they start at 0), while at a certain point (and array size) the charge-up would increase dramatically, then it would slow down again with increasing towards a maximum of perhaps 3-4 seconds (time would be on the vertical axis, array size on the horizontal one).
It basically says: small arrays should barely notice a charge-up (a threshold could be added to completely eliminate it up to x blocks), while larger arrays should actually suffer from it gradually until they reach some sort of maximum so things won't become extreme.
This charge-up wouldn't only be a cool effect, it could also be used as an interesting balance mechanism: beams could scale in a stronger fashion (if they aren't overpowered at the moment). It would also mean that having one big beam weapon should be much more useful in some way to keep things properly balanced, but I don't want to stray off too far.
The sounds that accompany it could even slowly blend between each other as the array increases in size, rather than having a hard limit where the sound discretely changes into something else. This could all even be procedurally generated if that's your cup of tea (would be pretty revolutionary). So it would basically have a charge-up sound that wouldn't sound bad when interrupted early, a looping sound for the beam itself, and a power-down sound after releasing the fire button.
The charge-up would have a graphical animated effect too, perhaps one of a lens-flare-ish effect that slowly increases in size in front of the beam weapon's output.
A last thing would be to make the beams themselves look cooler, but I'm sure that will happen some day (check vid below please).
FreeSpace 2 (game) did beam weapons on capitals very well in my opinion, it's really worth taking a look at, they have this powerful and satisfying feeling to them, sound- and graphic-wise:
Cannon-based weapons
What could be improved about them?
-The butt-ugly muzzle-flash in the shape of a chopped off cone
-The sound effects could gradually blend into each other instead of a discrete limit where it gets a new sound (or perhaps add a few more of those steps to make it more gradual).
Yes, I'm talking about the good old AMC's, they are called cannons now. I have always had one major gripe with them, and that's the way the muzzle-flash looks, so I'm going to elaborate on that.
As far as I know, it's not possible to mod this muzzle-flash in any way, because of the odd shape it has (it's a model, and as far as I know it has no image based texture). I always wondered why schema didn't go for a much more obvious way of producing a muzzle-flash for cannons, by using perpendicular planes with an additive texture on them.
Check this example for instance (yes, EXAMPLE, not that it should look like this):
You would/could use three perpendicular planes for this with additive blending. I know a lot of games that construct muzzle-flashes in this fashion because it's easy, reliable and it looks great as well if you properly align everything.
This is a quick and very simple one that I just made, using that method (Rendered in Bryce 6.3):
First person view example with two medium arrays perhaps:
Underlying scene minus the cube:
Side image for the muzzle flash that I made in Paint Shop Pro (front image is a fading disk):
This can be scaled any way you want together with the array size, especially if the same method gets used that was used for creating the sun graphic (which is based on a very small image that gets filtered heavily). It can also be animated, starting larger and ending smaller in a very short time span.
People will also be able to mod this image then, and make cool things out of it, adding to the moddability of the game. It should have a decent size though (not 16x16 or something like the sun). The flash could color itself along with the light block that has been assigned to the array, to match colors.
This same method can be used for the thruster graphics, although those seem to look alright for their purpose.
Well that's all I have to say for now, fairly long post as I said!
Small warning: this post is going to be fairly long.
Beam weapons
A lot can be done to make these much more interesting:
-You can add a charge-up that scales as the array grows in size
-The beams could have a charge-up sound, a looping sound, and a shut-down sound
-The beams themselves could scale up in size when the array becomes larger (I'm sure this is planned)
I want to go in more detail about the charge-up.
So how would this work?
Basically, beam weapons would require a certain amount of time to collect the energy required to make them fire. This amount of time would scale with the size of the array, but rather not in a linear fashion.
The scaling graph would look similar to a logit function:
Disregard the numbers and characters entirely, it's about the shape!
This graph would imply that smaller arrays would barely notice any charge-up (assuming they start at 0), while at a certain point (and array size) the charge-up would increase dramatically, then it would slow down again with increasing towards a maximum of perhaps 3-4 seconds (time would be on the vertical axis, array size on the horizontal one).
It basically says: small arrays should barely notice a charge-up (a threshold could be added to completely eliminate it up to x blocks), while larger arrays should actually suffer from it gradually until they reach some sort of maximum so things won't become extreme.
This charge-up wouldn't only be a cool effect, it could also be used as an interesting balance mechanism: beams could scale in a stronger fashion (if they aren't overpowered at the moment). It would also mean that having one big beam weapon should be much more useful in some way to keep things properly balanced, but I don't want to stray off too far.
The sounds that accompany it could even slowly blend between each other as the array increases in size, rather than having a hard limit where the sound discretely changes into something else. This could all even be procedurally generated if that's your cup of tea (would be pretty revolutionary). So it would basically have a charge-up sound that wouldn't sound bad when interrupted early, a looping sound for the beam itself, and a power-down sound after releasing the fire button.
The charge-up would have a graphical animated effect too, perhaps one of a lens-flare-ish effect that slowly increases in size in front of the beam weapon's output.
A last thing would be to make the beams themselves look cooler, but I'm sure that will happen some day (check vid below please).
FreeSpace 2 (game) did beam weapons on capitals very well in my opinion, it's really worth taking a look at, they have this powerful and satisfying feeling to them, sound- and graphic-wise:
Cannon-based weapons
What could be improved about them?
-The butt-ugly muzzle-flash in the shape of a chopped off cone
-The sound effects could gradually blend into each other instead of a discrete limit where it gets a new sound (or perhaps add a few more of those steps to make it more gradual).
Yes, I'm talking about the good old AMC's, they are called cannons now. I have always had one major gripe with them, and that's the way the muzzle-flash looks, so I'm going to elaborate on that.
As far as I know, it's not possible to mod this muzzle-flash in any way, because of the odd shape it has (it's a model, and as far as I know it has no image based texture). I always wondered why schema didn't go for a much more obvious way of producing a muzzle-flash for cannons, by using perpendicular planes with an additive texture on them.
Check this example for instance (yes, EXAMPLE, not that it should look like this):
You would/could use three perpendicular planes for this with additive blending. I know a lot of games that construct muzzle-flashes in this fashion because it's easy, reliable and it looks great as well if you properly align everything.
This is a quick and very simple one that I just made, using that method (Rendered in Bryce 6.3):
First person view example with two medium arrays perhaps:
Underlying scene minus the cube:
Side image for the muzzle flash that I made in Paint Shop Pro (front image is a fading disk):
This can be scaled any way you want together with the array size, especially if the same method gets used that was used for creating the sun graphic (which is based on a very small image that gets filtered heavily). It can also be animated, starting larger and ending smaller in a very short time span.
People will also be able to mod this image then, and make cool things out of it, adding to the moddability of the game. It should have a decent size though (not 16x16 or something like the sun). The flash could color itself along with the light block that has been assigned to the array, to match colors.
This same method can be used for the thruster graphics, although those seem to look alright for their purpose.
Well that's all I have to say for now, fairly long post as I said!
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