[REL][CLIENT][EFFECT] Solar Flare

I wanted to play around with the new effects including the new sun.pfx file, so I made this.

• Corona rotates
• 3D Solar flares added, rotate slowly
  • Randomized
  • there is a weird bug where the flares will be blue-green when the camera is zoomed out really far, and it seems to be random.
  • Another bug, the flares seem to disappear when you rotate around the system. I have absolutely no idea why( @bgolus ? Mesh lifetime is 100000) It can be seen in the second video.
• Added small smoke particles to the edge of the star

UPDATED:

OLD:




It's realeased on PAMM, but nothing is official ofc xD

Any suggestions and tweaks are welcome as always!

Prudy, but could you make it so the flares can grow and shrink and have some disappear and reappear so it appears to be changing rather than stagnant. Solar prominences would also be cool, like below.

Those kinds of solar flares are basically impossible. I can make a looping flare like the picture, but... actually I might be able to make that with a few hax. I definitely can't make anything realistic like that though (there's not a super complex particle simulation in PA that you find in 3D rendering programs like Blender and Cinema 4D, for example, which would murder the GPU anyway)

I changed some code to fix an issue with scaled effects disappearing when partially offscreen (mostly noticeable with planet scaled effects), but I think I introduced another bug with it.

darn bugs

Did I just see a unit cannon in the asteroid belt
#unitcannonconfirmed

Excellent work so far kiwi. Looking forward to seeing what the end result will be like

Looked into this one. It's because it is random.

You created a mesh particle emitter (with a custom mesh!), but you have to define textures for mesh particles differently than a normal particle emitter.

You're setting the baseTexture, which is used for all other particle types, doesn't work on mesh particles. So the texture you're getting is almost literally a random texture from the game. (It's actually the last texture used by the rendering system set to the "Texture" shader parameter.)

For a mesh particle you need to use a materialProperties block:

Code:

                "materialProperties": {
                    "Texture": "/pa/effects/textures/particles/flat.papa"
                }

Yup that works!

Also, i changed the mesh for the looping-magnetic flare things. It's still not super realistic but it's so bright that you can't see the perfections in the effect.

Update:

• Dynamic, randomized scale and size increase/decrease
  • The flares will increase and decrease in size randomly

This is probably the final update because there's not much more to do haha

little suggestion i'd like to make: maybe make it so solar flares will disable some units and building on a random planet temporarily (like a solar flare ould in real life) , maybe as a little setting, so people who only want the detail only need the detail

Well there's a few reasons why I can't do that:

1. It's impossible
2. It would be very imbalanced
3. This mod is a client mod and only affects the user with the mod installed. It sends no data to servers.

But yeah it's a decent idea. Still would be imbalanced tho

eh, just a thought