You have one texture, and the texture contains multiple frames on it. Check the default sins texture directory and look at autocannon.tga.

So, this contains several small sheets in it. Various muzzle flashes to randomize between and some tracers for projectiles.

The sheets I am using in Black Sun look something like this, but their individual frames are much larger. I seem to have run into some kind of limit in that sins can't use a 4kx4k texture properly (I wanted high-definition frames for explosions), so most of my animated sheets average 512x512 to 2kx2k. Yeah, if your project is really straddling the ram limit you want to be super careful with these.

How it works is that in the respective TextureAnimations directory, a text file hands the game information about that sheet. This is what my average entity for that looks like.

TXT
textureFileName "ah_medflame1desaturate.tga"
numFrames 16
numFramesPerRow 4
startTopLeft [0, 0]
frameSize [128, 128]
frameStride [128, 128]

To explain what these lines do,

textureFileName is pretty obvious. Both dds and tga work. I try to stick to tga.

numFrames - this is your total frames for the animation this file accesses. For something like that autocannon.tga the next lines will be a lot less clear than this.

numFramesPerRow - This tells the game to cycle rows after X frames have been played. Again, this helps keep the autocannon.tga from drifting off its current stuff. For my sheets, they are usually 4x4.

startTopLeft - This will almost always be 0,0 except in the circumstances where your frames don't start at the top left (like autocannon.tga, this will determine the starting location of whatever part of that sheet you are using). Since stuff like autocannon.tga involve math and co-ordinates and stuff I avoid using complex sprite sheets like that. I suck at math.

frameSize - Fairly obviously. You can use XNview to build a grid to determine frame sizes in most sheets, because for some reason some companies use non-standard sizes like 99x99. If this is not correct, the frames will "drift" on the particle.

frameStride - This should be the same as frameSize always, I think. I am pretty sure this determines how the game "sees" what the next frame should be located at.

Inside ParticleForge, instead of assigning a texture, you assign that animated texture text file. Here's a gander at my high-performance, streamlined workplace.

So, basically, the life of the particle spawning that animated texture is determined by the frame counts and the FPS. The FPS and frame counts don't seem to translate 1:1; my 16 frame sheets @ 30fps usually last 0.85 or 0.8. Well, I don't pretend to know math. If the life is too long for the sheet, it flips out. If the sheet has too many frames it also will flip out. Not sure why. But, a single particle can cycle the entire animated texture. The goal of particles is usually to simulate animation - I can turn an explosion into 1/8 of its original uptime by using these animated textures, and they will usually look much better than using static textures. It all depends on what kind of texture sheets you have available, though. I had to rip dozens of games to find anything good. I still don't have exactly what I need; I'll need to make some custom ones.

But the end result really can't be competed with in this game, I think. I may not be the best particle editor here, but I think Black Sun will really catch people off guard on how good the particles look. Many of those are probably too large/flashy for something like b5 weapons but the methodology could still be useful. Maybe I could build a video tutorial to explain my designs.

Cool, thanks a lot. I'm ashamed to admit till now I've never looked at the texture animations. We should really be using these. If only that was allowed for Ship textures...

Finding good texture sheets is a real chore, so it's not really surprising it's not widespread. Once you get some good ones, though, ones that fit your overall graphics very well, it makes a huge difference. In my recordings for Salvation there is a lot of performance and fps loss. This is almost entirely due to the particles I was using at the time. Even though I am now using far higher poly models, ships with more guns, and Rebellion's shadows, the performance of my project actually massively increased from dropping particle usage and replacing stuff like sizeoscillator with animated textures.

If you're looking for minimalist particles that still catch the eye, animated textures are worth looking into.

Thinking of the creepy animated skin of Shadow vessels **shudders** , now that would have been impressive, ahh well.

I've just tried the Typhoon map, and when SotYR is enabled, your homeworld is linked to a chain of just 4 systems, which are cut off (no phase lanes) from the rest of the map. All your allies are also isolated from the other planets too.

regarding the animated ship textures, I remember seeing some models in game (back in original sins day) that used the sun type textures ( I think it was manshooter's work but could be wrong)

harpo

edit the sun shader was used in parts of the mesh for lighting and the effect.

edit #2, did a search of the forum and found the exact ones i had the memory of,(https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/361694/get;3016317) and it is by thoumsin in babylon 5 diplomacy thread

Yes, I had experimented with spawning Undead ships as particle meshes and using the sun shader on them or something. It caused them to ripple but not with much tiling depth to them (not nearly enough for shadows). I can't remember exactly how I had the particle set up, though, or if it still works.

Yeah, we use it for the lit parts of the Vorlon cruisers. But for the base mesh you can not specify the shader used (what a pity) and we can not add additional shader files, only replace the basic ones. So if we change the sun shader or any other it will change more than we anticipate.

Thanks for the tip, this will come in handy.

Is this due to missing wormhole tech? Or other reasons?

Narn DagKar weapon 1 missile travel speed is 400, way too slow suggest adjust to 900. Still very slow as weapons go but is 200 faster than the Centauri Haven which has maxSpeedLinear 700.000000. Without the adjustment the missile fire from the DagKar is unable to catch most other ships, especially noticeable during running or tail chase battles.

* Typhoon has no wormholes.

* I've played SotYR on maps with wormholes.

That does remind me of an issue that's probably related to the missing tech - scouts that are set to auto-explore will get stuck at a wormhole, they just sit at the edge of the event horizon.

Hey guys, Im having a problem with one of the EA ships. It's just showing up as a black box. Is this a known issue? Anyways, awesome game, keep up the good work

Known issue, will be fixed when a proper model is made for it.

Not an issue but a "feature". Otherwise I would get error popups in the dev.exe on every ship where the Weapon loadout of the mesh differs from the entity file. So as SpardaSon21 said, they will gradually be replaced with the correct models once available.

Missiles are purely visual effects; they will do damage long before hitting the ship itself.

TobiWahn,

   Could the SotYR manual be exported as XML instead of PDF? I might (when bored) be able to figure out an XSLT to generate HTML pages for the ships etc.

Using the dev.exe, it looks like the Typhoon map's problem with SotYR is caused by

Can we just make moons ... 'micro' planets?

If only we could make a fighter entity that behaved as a missile... It would be so refreshing to be able to have an opportunity to shoot down missiles as well as strike craft.

A frigate with the Omega ram ability could work but the whole sequencing would be a pain to orchestrate. Still...an ability with a visual flash that created "x" number of temporary frigates that had the ram ability...

Considering the already large amount of fighters we have this would kill performance. Totally

Submitted to the repository, many thanks!

Been looking at the BSG mod and there is much there to like.

The first and most obvious feature is the pacing; by comparison SOTYR plays in excruciating slow motion. I need to compare resource costs but it is very clear ours are too high. To maintain existing balance an across the board % reduction makes the most sense. Additional adjustments will be likely but it should be a significant pacing correction.

The second feature are Cylon ship missile graphics which are vastly superior to the base SoaSE. If we received permission to use and modify from that base effort it would be a win.

Third is an apparent utilization of shield mitigation with a shield value of zero. Would be nice to know how this was resolved...

I haven't looked that deep but the above jumped out like road flares.

From what I can see, the slower pace of SotYR is to reflect the time-line based tech-tree and for a wide variety of build times between weak and strong units. Resource costs also reflect the latter, although reducing these across the board is probably not a bad idea as it might encourage AIs to build a wider variety of structures and ships - I've rarely seen AIs build turrets & repair bays for example.

Speaking of which, I think there may be another problem with repair bays that certainly affects Minbari - not sure about other races yet. After a ship has been repaired it permanently gets a hull regen bonus, even after leaving the grav well which contained the repair bay. With the 'Labour for Honour' tech this bonus is a massive 80 hull points per sec.

Troligan and Sharoos that fulfil the siege & support roles** have their formationRank set to 1, may be these could get up to two extra squads when they reach certain levels.

Only the Sharkaan would be left as a battleship role** with a formationRank of 0, it would get just one extra squadron as it levels up. I see more as the definitive 'ship killer' variant of the Sharlin that relies more on firepower & armour but less on strike craft. Maybe allow it to host Tishats for self defence against bombers.

Setting the ranks would hopefully make large fleets of war cruisers less unwieldy as they currently form two wide rows, one above the other. Using the formationRank value should make large fleets form up in columns.

** Changing their statCountType to an appropriate value would means the 'Statistics' screen was more accurate, currently every war-cruiser (except the Troligan) is counted as a Battleship.

Agree the above are worth playing with to see if the tweaks achieve the desired results.

Sharlin starts with 3 flights and peaks at 5. Adjusting the ValueIncreasePerLevel from 0.200000 to 0.334000 would increase the max flights to 6 adding new flights at levels 4, 7 and 10.

Most ships for all the races are formationRank 0 so this period of adjustment experimentation is needed for every race.

I've just had a stab at my first .particle - this time for the Shadow Scout. Taking the particle for the Advent Disciple and changing it to a purple colour looks very close the scene in Shadow Dancing, I might have a look to see if there's a closer sound effect too.

Sadly my idea for the Omega's plasma cannon didn't pan out.

I've gone back a looked at this, however the timings for the Tinashi don't seem right. The primary weapon has a forward only damage of 480 and a cooldown of 9sec. Whereas the secondary weapon has damage of 240 forward + 2x180 (L+R) with a cooldown of 4.5sec. Both have a 3sec duration. Does that make the forward damage of both weapons around the same? Or have I missed something here?