Possible suggestion to spice up combat visuals.

Yep, just open the .entity file for the ship you want to play with and tweak away. The variables should be self explanatory, but if not, post in the modding thread and there are guys who have mastered that stuff and should be able to help you out

P.S Almost all Sins data files can be opened with notepad.

Rockin', thanks.

Did so, and must say, I rather like the effect.

Here's a quick & dirty capture of how it looks (as butchered by google video):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-407227294302653153

With the original quality here:
http://rapidshare.com/files/43930951/KolAutoCannons.avi.html

All I did was drop the cooldown and damage by a factor of 6. Although, in retrospect, I imagine this also affects shield mitigation. :/

Ah well.

Holy, that looks amazing.
Hell, imho even better than the original, really shows the meaning of "autocannon" .
Speaking of combat visuals, quite a few things I would expect, are missing. I am a little dissatisfied, particularly with frigates. Death animations would rock, and by that I mean once a ship dies, it stays in space for a few seconds while small explosions occur inside, until the final violent explosion occurs, ripping the ship to shreds. Also would love to see wrecks for every ship, including frigates. Would look very nice after a large fleet battle, and seeing the remains of ships floating around for a few minutes or so.

Indeed, that autocannon stuff looks pretty cool - maybe we should adjust it

Sypher, most of the debris artwork isn't in the game yet, but the code is already setup to do what you described. We'll get it in there as soon as we can and you will have your post-battle debris field

That looked pretty good. Though those bullets came together so fast and so many that it made it look like some sort of laser.

If you could decrease the accuracy of those guns, it would look even better.

Ohhhh that looked so much better!

"If you could decrease the accuracy of those guns, it would look even better."
I agree.

Post-battle debris fields YAY!

Wow, that was awesome. It was amazing how much all that firepower added to game immersion...and the coolness factor. I didn't until now realize how much the present salvo system could be improved.

Blair and crew really need to consider upping the fire rate on auto cannons and flak frigates.

I can only agree, that looks great ! It could be applied to other weapons as well ... the will make it realistic !

Please please please change it in the next beta/version of the game !!!

My first thought was "oooh that looks very BSG". I won't tell you how much I love the scene where the defensive barrage opens up at the end of the BSG mini series.

I've only had time to play an hour or two so far, but I agree this would be a great change.

Another thing combat sorely needs is movement. So far the only thing I've seen moving is fighters. Everything else just moves into position then stands still exchanging shots. While capital ships are clearly not fighters, just stopping dead in the water does not seem a terribly good tactic. More importantly, it looks boring.

I modified the KOLs auto-cannons to fire 35 round bursts instead of the default 15, also looks mighty good!

Glad everyone seems to like the effect.



That's exactly what I wanted -- BSG's guns are exactly what I think of when I think 'autocannon'. Flak could use a little improvement imo, as well -- what I'd like is that instead of looking like another gun effect, I want it to be a small explosion, with a little bit of smoke/remnants staying in place for a bit -- you know, like real flak.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=O8W2R8mQAtY - kinda like that.

Actually, if I have time this weekend, I think I'll do some similar tweaks on all the ships (again, without changing the actual DPS, aside from factoring in shield mitigation) then upload them for people to give 'em a shot if you want.

Question: Does changing the graphics like that involve any gameplay level (e. g. damage done) calculations?

hi i do agree with many suggest there...

This game is from now on awsome but could be much more with few changes

first: bether impact on hulls
second: bether impact on shields (sort of shock wave ...like on water)
third: moving gun on ship is a minimum
fourth: the smoke of the missile, could it be change for a Homeworld style exaust
fift: the way fighters and bombers dock is some time glitchy (maybe you already have that in mind)
sixt: explosion (if possible) could be a little like in hegemonya.....
and i do agree a lot with Tsed and his idea of one on one ...but a little diferent
ships formation would penetrate each other wile staying in formation and staying there to fight.... ex
î î
x=ship side x x------------------x
o=ship side o o--------------o
x - x--------x------x
-=trajectory o--o------------o--o
x - x---------x----x
o---o---------------o-o
x - x----------x---x
o---o----------o---o
x- x----------x-----x
î î
(the stay there and fight)
BOOMMM intense gun fignt;)

please thell what you think about my suggest..
SeniorDonde

sory it didnt work for tyhe shema i will try this one

x=ship side x
o=ship side o
-=trajectory
.= nothing
x-x--------x------x
........... o--o------------o--o
x-x---------x----x
.............o---o---------------o-o
x-x----------x---x
.............o---o----------o---o
x-x----------x-----x

Senior Donde, please let me recommend the browser "Firefox" to you. Among its many excellent features is a spell check function, which (properly used) will allow us to better understand and interpret you. Because as things stand, we can't. Or at least, I can't.

Well, the I reduce the damage to compensate for the reduced cooldown, so effectively, the damage should be the same... however, that's not really going to be the case, because shield mitigation increases with the hits per time period (in some way... I don't know the details). So, in practice, the individual damage might need to be increased a bit to compensate for that effect. I'm not overly concerned about it for my own screwing around, but it's there. Beyond that... only thing I can think of is that increasing the RoF of flak frigates might have some undesired effect on how easily fighters can be taken down, but I haven't checked the stats on that yet. (if one flak frigate hit easily takes out a fighter, then this would probably make flak frigates considerably more (too) dangerous... I'll check it out)

as mentioned already in the thread... movement is deffinitly needed. i love the graphics so far! but every time im in a battle i keep wanting to call out "evasive maneuver Riker Alpha Sigma!" and nothing happens... makes me sad on the inside. though i imagen this feature is probably on its way.

So, in short its not just a graphical change -- your changing the actual damage the weapon does and have to counter-balance it. Thanks.

Mitigation is based on damage received, so as long as you balance them to maintain the same DPS, it shouldn't effect shields any.

I definitely don't think that the autocannon should fire constantly like that. I do however believe it should fire larger salvos (numerically speaking, not in terms of the size of the rounds) and more often. But firing constantly just doesn't seem to look very good to me.

Although, I do admit the BSG defensive barrage looked cool, keep in mind that that is not how they always fire their weapons. That was an emergency situation. Perhaps make something like that work for the Finest Hour ability for the Kol though, that all weapon cooldowns are decreased to zero for the period, thus allowing for a barrage of fire, and the forward beams would also have zero cooldown (although perhaps this would have to be changed, might be too powerful, but then again, it would only be firing on one ship at a time, so meh).