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Title: Display Quad Damage as the weapon glowing, not the player Post by: cheb on September 17, 2012, 12:16:51 PM There were many versions of the Quad VFX over the years, and the current one feels unsatisfactory. It's not prominent enough, *especially* when a red team player has the Quad.
So, I propose this: instead of mucking with the player skin, which is hard and often leads to nowhere, make the *weapon* glow. Glow *very* bright, with the only colors it could have being brightest cyan (R0, G255, B255) to pure white. Could be done via shader or a separate set of weapon textures (which would give greater control). This requires some minor tweaking of the lightning gun, to make its normal state darker blue with darker electrodes, and switching its VFX to pure white -- my another pet peeve, as it's often confusing if the blue glow of doom is from Quad of from the LG 'muzzle flash'. There should be *only one* blue glow and that's Quad. Additionally, there could be a ghostly bull/demon head with angry glowing eyes overlapped with either the weapon, or the player skin head, whichever suits better. It would require only one, non-animated, model with one skin, but the look would be pure badassery -- and no more confusion. You see the glowing horns and eyes, you know it's time to shit bricks >:D A gaping toothy maw around the weapon muzzle would be a fine variation too. Title: Re: Display Quad Damage as the weapon glowing, not the player Post by: Gig on September 20, 2012, 03:55:07 AM First of all, let's sum up how we arrived to the current (0.8.8) powerup effects...
The change in powerup effects from 0.8.5 to 0.8.8 has been necessary due to another change: IIRC, to prevent some users to use some tweaks to get unfair advantange (something like "overbrightbits" maybe), Fromhell changed something that caused existing "glowing" shaders to be much less effective. Noticing that (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=4356.msg41192#msg41192), I pointed out the problem, capturing some screenshots from OA0.8.5 and OA0.8.8RC1 (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=4356.msg41270#msg41270), comparing with how they looked like in Q3 (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=4356.msg41306#msg41306). Then, Udi created a "fix" for that (called "specfix"), with some tweaked shaders: here you can see its first version (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=4356.msg41379#msg41379), and here the second version (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=4356.msg41478#msg41478), that IIRC is the one that then went into the final 0.8.8 release. To make such effects more visible with the new system ("specular"?), he needed to make the shaders more thick than before, and this caused them to be a little less "nice" in firstperson than their 0.8.5 counterparts, especially with some weapons (see (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=4417.msg42386#msg42386))... but this was a necessary compromise to keep them well visible from other players point of view. I don't remember about specific tests with team models... maybe we forgot to do them... |