I've just started digging into texture, model, & animation modding for EECH. I would really like to try updating the weapon graphical effects to some kind of realism. I'm talking mostly about explosions, smoke, fire. Right now they are pretty but don't look much like real life at all. I hope we can change that.
Please participate by replying with links to video if you would. Thanks!!
To start, I'm looking for various helicopter weapons hitting targets & the resulting explosions/fires (not just launching): -Hellfires -M230 chain gun (Apache) -Hydra 70mm rockets -Vikrs -20mm gatling gun -etc.
Links with full color video are ideal. Combat or training footage is fine but avoid FLIR gun camera footage--it is abundant but not very useful.
Not really what you asked for, but I think the explosions in Rise of Flight look very real, so they could provide some inspiration:
These are artillery, but I don't think a missile hit wouldn't look all that different. At least much more like this than the "Hollywood" huge fireball explosions we're used to.
Rise of Flight easily has some of the best graphics/explosions I've ever seen in a sim. I definitely concur they look more realistic than most for explosions.
Actually, that's useful too--I am looking at game reference for construction ideas so that's great, thx! BF3 has some nice FX too (how they're built anyway, not necessarily the realism). -Olds
Sorry to intrude, I don't normally post here but I just saw this thread and it looked of interest. One thing I will say to anyone looking to make modded explosions (I didn't even know you were getting that into it), is that certain ammuniton/missiles create different types of explosions of different types of surface/target.
I was always impressed with Jane's Longbow 2 for this, as when you shoot at the ground with the chaingun the impacts just look like little explosions. But when you hit armor, you also get a visible fragmentation effect. It's logic really, if a weapon hits the ground it goes into the dirt and muffles most of the explosion effect, where if you hit something hard, and for the most part impregnable, a lot of the explosion can be seen on the 'surface'.
I thought I had a close-up video I took in LB2 already at YouTube to give you an example, but it appears that I don't, sorry.
Flyboy, I may have been wrong about that. As I run more tests on the spriteFX I see that there may be at least a bit of object differentiation in the game code. Cool!
I tried to record a video in LB2 of the impact effects that I was talking about, but the sim plays up nowadays and won't let Fraps work on my PC when it is running. I also tried to take some screenshots but that didn't work either.
I did, however, find ONE shot that I had taken previously which shows, to some extent, what I was talking about. Sorry it is just a single picture, and there's no motion to the animations to give you a better idea.
Longbow 2 30mm chaingun impacts - on the left is a 'hit' on the armor, on the right is a 'miss' on the ground just beside target.
As you can see, there are two different impact effects for the 30mm, at least, depending on if the ground is hit or the armor is hit.
Flyboy in eech are also two types of explosions chaingun, but works on another principle. MI 28 /24 has a normal ammunition, and explosive, and depending on that which we use, is a different effect. Achieving this effect how you show,is impossible without changing the game code. But Olds doing a great job, I can not wait when he starts to change the missile explosions
You can do that with the chain gun effect in EECH, and I plan on giving it a try. The problem is that many weapons share the same effect--and that part looks currently hard-coded. We might fix the chain gun but break a bunch of other weapons, and BANITA is right--a fix involves code.
I haven't finished mapping out what graphical effect goes with what game event, I'll be able to say more once that's done.
-Olds
P.S. FireBird's approach is 100% right on: expose a much as possible to user-editable data files. It slows down load times but speeds up improvements exponentially!
BANITA - Yes, I have played EECH believe it or not and I remember the different effects for the different ammo types on the Russian helicopters! The AP ammo impacts just created like a mini cloud of dust and the HE ammo impacts created a mini firey explosion.
Well, I don't even play that now as it has become more and more annoying for me due to issues on modern PCs. I have had my fair share of problems and have just about finally hung up my LB2 helmet.
But before, the reason that I only played that was because it was the Longbow sim that felt most natural to me, and I haven't become the 'expert' on the sim that many people rely on by simply playing it once in a while alongside all the other Longbow sims out there. Plus, out-of-the-box it's still the most authentic Longbow sim there is.
Gaming aside, what with the other games I play and all my other online and offline tasks I do on a computer, not even taking into account real-life, or any health issues I may have, time has just become too short to get too much into any other sims - even in a genre as small as combat helicopter sims where you can fly an AH-64D. So forgive me if I only ever stuck to one sim for any length of time or purpose.
I'll be posting the sprite effects work there too as it progresses and I figure out how to use the YouTubes. I know I haven't showed much--it's coming along well, but there's been a lot more groundwork to be done to understand the sprite system. You gotta figure it out before you can understand how to push it to its limits...
Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it, -Olds
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The AP ammo impacts just created like a mini cloud of dust and the HE ammo impacts created a mini firey explosion. 
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