I'm not sure I like the little balls of dark yellow/grey emitting from the fireballs in the screen shots you posted. They just don't seem realistic to my eyes, but hey, that is just my opinion.
Best Regards;
(System_Specs)
Case: Cooler Master Storm Trooper PSU: Ultra X3,1000-Watt MB: Asus Maximus VI Extreme Mem: Corsair Vengeance (2x 8GB), PC3-12800, DDR3-1600MHz, Unbuffered CPU: Intel i7-4770K, OC to 4.427Ghz CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Seidon 240M Liquid CPU Cooler Vid Card: ASUS GTX 980Ti STRIX 6GB OS and Games on separate: Samsung 840 Series 250GB SSD Monitor: Primary ASUS PG27AQ 4k; Secondary Samsung SyncMaster BX2450L Periphs: MS Sidewinder FFB2 Pro, TrackIR 4
#4328227 - 01/13/1712:47 AMRe: 4L0M New Effects for UE
[Re: 4L0M]
Hi Robert. Here is a (very poor) video of it in action.
I wouldn't normally record using fraps and panning with the hatswitch, but I just saw it was going to blow, so I quickly hit record, so apologies for the poor quality.
Basically, the little fireballs that you reference, are also annoyingly the flame texture when a plane catches fire, just used in a different context.
Even more annoying, is that these plane flames are also emitted as even smaller versions in some situations. As the base game is so old, and has no particle effect system like modern game engines do, the majority of effects appear to be just textures continually repeated to create movement. There are also a relatively small amount of textures to work with too.
Changing the texture for the small fireballs in the above Video has the knock on effect of altering effects in other areas, so it's a bit of nightmare to try and figure out how best to balance this out.
Quite a few of the textures even appear to be hand drawn, such as the roads on the map. I have just gone through the concrete roads, dirt roads, and paved roads and given them actual photo textures.
Same with a lot of the effects, and the actual .dds files are tiny (256x256px for a fireball in some cases etc) and I'm attempting to use High Definition photos of actual fireballs etc to replace all the hand drawn stuff.
It's still early days though, so I appreciate the feedback. Like I keep stating, trying to check everything I have altered in different daylight conditions, different planes/missions etc, is nigh on impossible, so any feedback is really helpful.
Cheers!
I7 4770k@4.6ghz WC H80i Asus Maximus Hero VII Corsair 1000w rm1000 psu 16gb Crucial Ballistix Tactical@2100 Creative zx soundcard 2 x MSI 970 GTX SLI 55" Sony Bravia 4k HDR Corsiar 760t
#4328237 - 01/13/1702:40 AMRe: 4L0M New Effects for UE
[Re: 4L0M]
4L0M, do you think you could possibly remove the white foamy outline on all of the water surfaces? I was going to work on that myself, but you sound like you are much better suited for this kind of work than I am. Boy, if you could that would be awesome, those foamy outlines have always bothered me. Of course, this is just my personal preference.
Last edited by Banjoman; 01/13/1702:41 AM.
Member and provider of banjo music for the Illustrious BOC
#4328240 - 01/13/1702:58 AMRe: 4L0M New Effects for UE
[Re: 4L0M]
I haven't had a chance to play WOFF or try your MOD due to RL issues. If you haven't already done so, are you able to separate your MOD, so I can choose which ones to install?
#4328246 - 01/13/1703:26 AMRe: 4L0M New Effects for UE
[Re: 4L0M]
@Banjoman, I will have a look for you mate. No promises, but I will see what I can do. Got another minimod to sort out first, but I will look at the weekend.
@Oldhat, I could try and split the mod into different categories, but it would be further down the line as it would take me ages to keep updating individual packs as opposed to just the one at the minute.
Last edited by 4L0M; 01/13/1703:27 AM.
I7 4770k@4.6ghz WC H80i Asus Maximus Hero VII Corsair 1000w rm1000 psu 16gb Crucial Ballistix Tactical@2100 Creative zx soundcard 2 x MSI 970 GTX SLI 55" Sony Bravia 4k HDR Corsiar 760t
#4328253 - 01/13/1704:34 AMRe: 4L0M New Effects for UE
[Re: 4L0M]
Joined: Jun 2012 Posts: 7,993Robert_Wiggins
BWOC Survivor!...So Far!!
Tnx for the explanation. I now understand the limitations you have to work with.
(System_Specs)
Case: Cooler Master Storm Trooper PSU: Ultra X3,1000-Watt MB: Asus Maximus VI Extreme Mem: Corsair Vengeance (2x 8GB), PC3-12800, DDR3-1600MHz, Unbuffered CPU: Intel i7-4770K, OC to 4.427Ghz CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Seidon 240M Liquid CPU Cooler Vid Card: ASUS GTX 980Ti STRIX 6GB OS and Games on separate: Samsung 840 Series 250GB SSD Monitor: Primary ASUS PG27AQ 4k; Secondary Samsung SyncMaster BX2450L Periphs: MS Sidewinder FFB2 Pro, TrackIR 4
#4328478 - 01/14/1702:37 PMRe: 4L0M New Effects for UE
[Re: 4L0M]
NEW : All New Fire and Flame effect Replacers - 2x The Original reolution and Handmade from scratch.
With the new double resolution Flame and fire effects and my 4x Road Texture mod that I have been working on ( Not yet Included ), continually testing a run of quick combat of 20 v 20 planes in various weather conditions and maps VRAM usage has increased by about a measly 50mb. That's it.
Game with mod installed currently uses about 1.3GB of VRAM @1080p -60fps with 8xSQ and 2xSS enabled in Nvidia Inspector testing on an ASUS STRIX 970GTX.
With the new double resolution Flame, fire and smoke effects and my 4x Road Texture mod that I have been working on ( Not yet Included ), continually testing a run of quick combat of 20 v 20 planes in various weather conditions and maps VRAM usage has increased by about a measly 50mb. That's it.
Game with mod installed currently uses about 1.3GB of VRAM @1080p -60fps with 8xSQ and 2xSS enabled in Nvidia Inspector testing on an ASUS STRIX 970GTX.
This mod will not decrease FPS in any way on any modern-ish GPU with 1.5GB or more onboard VRAM.
I7 4770k@4.6ghz WC H80i Asus Maximus Hero VII Corsair 1000w rm1000 psu 16gb Crucial Ballistix Tactical@2100 Creative zx soundcard 2 x MSI 970 GTX SLI 55" Sony Bravia 4k HDR Corsiar 760t
#4328585 - 01/14/1711:33 PMRe: 4L0M New Effects for UE
[Re: 4L0M]
Joined: Nov 2014 Posts: 3,696Fullofit
Senior Member
4L0M the oil spatter is stunning and alone worth the price of admission. The pictures don't do it justice especially when the light hits it just right. For those still sitting on the fence see below for the light and shadow play on the windscreen:
The resolution is bumped up and very detailed. Great job 4L0M. On thing I noticed is that when 2 splatters overlap they start to flicker as in fighting which one should stay in front of the other. And it seems very colourful. I don't know what burnt oil looks like on glass in real life, but I wouldn't imagine it this "nice".
I haven't noticed any difference in flak when compared to stock and I still need to see the smoke and fire. Will report once I get to see these effects. Once again, great job and don't stop!
"Take the cylinder out of my kidneys, The connecting rod out of my brain, my brain, From out of my arse take the camshaft, And assemble the engine again."
#4328613 - 01/15/1701:16 AMRe: 4L0M New Effects for UE
[Re: 4L0M]
Hi Fullofit, first off, thanks for trying the mod. I noticed the double texture overlap once too, but only in about 10 hours of flying, I have thought of 3 different ways to possibly remedy this, one super easy, one easy, but time consuming and one that may be a nightmare,lol.
Hopefully I will sort this minor issue out in time. To be honest, I'm amazed with all our new hardware we can actually run a 14 year old game engine anyway, So I suppose anything else to try and enhance the experience is a bonus !
In regard to the flak, I have only tweaked it slightly by brightening the Initial implosion, Giving it a ( In my opinion ), a high quality real smoke texture image and rendering it at 512x512px instead of 256x256, and cleaning up the slight pixellation in the Alpha channel for a higher defined look when one explodes up close.
Cheers!
Last edited by 4L0M; 01/15/1701:18 AM.
I7 4770k@4.6ghz WC H80i Asus Maximus Hero VII Corsair 1000w rm1000 psu 16gb Crucial Ballistix Tactical@2100 Creative zx soundcard 2 x MSI 970 GTX SLI 55" Sony Bravia 4k HDR Corsiar 760t
#4328660 - 01/15/1712:18 PMRe: 4L0M New Effects for UE
[Re: 4L0M]
From the pics, the smoke effects look very nice. The fire effects look a bit brighter than default WOFF.
Would it be possible to make the fire look more like flames (instead of fireballs) and mix in a bit of trailing smoke in the fire textures so that they can gradually transition into the smoke textures?
I didn't know that splitting the MOD would make too much work for updating. Maybe you can consider it later.
4L0M the oil spatter is stunning and alone worth the price of admission. The pictures don't do it justice especially when the light hits it just right.
Agreed, Fullofit!
Hi 4L0M,
I know this is still a work in progress, so just some feedback. Take a bomber squad and heavily bomb a railyard from about 3000 feet. There's lots of stuff burning down there, vehicles (oil, gas, tires), warehouse goods, wood. etc. And the stock smoke colors reflect that with a mixture of white and black smoke, and multiple colors in between.
I'm running your v0.25 effects mod, and my squad bombed a railyard last night. The smoke was a homogeneous "tan" color like dust, even though we had just about everything on fire in the railyard.
Everything's looking great other than that from what I can tell!
Just thought I'd give some feedback while I'm thinking about it. I even circled the railyard thinking "I don't remember it looking like that."
Maybe I'm crazy, but I'm guessing some of these smoke effects are also being used for the destruction of ground objects?
Something changed down there
Thanks for all this!
Dogfighting is what you do "after" you drop your bombs and blow something up! Can you say "JABO!"
#4328745 - 01/15/1707:44 PMRe: 4L0M New Effects for UE
[Re: 4L0M]
I haven't seen the flak textures, yet, but remember that flak is very finetuned in the effectfile, to randomly spread and turn into mushrooms and other random shapes. Using different textures, different sizes etc. might prevent this effect to be displayed properly since the finetuning was made for stock textures (which are also new in UE btw.)
The oil looks great btw. Not sure if it shoudn't be more in brownish colours, like oil for motors usually look like (maybe merged with this colourful version) but it looks great.
Seriously though, Flak used to be black and white for the two sides. I think it's just black now. It could be just me, you know, mushrooms and all.
"Take the cylinder out of my kidneys, The connecting rod out of my brain, my brain, From out of my arse take the camshaft, And assemble the engine again."
#4328755 - 01/15/1708:59 PMRe: 4L0M New Effects for UE
[Re: 4L0M]
Banjoman, that's good to know. I've only seen the black puffs flying on both sides.
"Take the cylinder out of my kidneys, The connecting rod out of my brain, my brain, From out of my arse take the camshaft, And assemble the engine again."
#4328886 - 01/16/1705:22 PMRe: 4L0M New Effects for UE
[Re: 4L0M]