[REL] Team Commander Explosion Color [75330]

Ever been in a FFA and heard a distant Commander Explosion, without knowing which exact player just blew up ?
Well, this mod may help a bit identifying the poor fella.

Following the already existing Team Color Mods (Uber Cannon, Fabrication Lathe and WIP Building), here is the Commander Explosion :

Small GIF :


Courtesy of @trialq who made some awesome videos to introduce mods (check them here !)


This mod replace the default color of a Commander Explosion by a player's primary color.

Available on PAMM
Zip attached.
GitHub link.

V3.0.0
Added Orbital Comm Explosion
V2.0.0
Updated effect
V1.0.0
Initial Release / Early Draft

Thanks to @wondible for the handy auto 9 AI sandbox, and @Mereth for PAMM built-in login, those are time saver
Thanks to @bgolus for allowing such modifications

Feedback is welcome

Nice!

Aw dang, I was going to do this. Beat me to it.

Hope you didn't spend too much time on it if you already started to look at the shader files.
I know how much time it takes for testing

I noticed on Monday last week, that it was possible to override the color (I had a basic mod ready in local) with PTE 69994, so I started tweaking things late that night, but I had to fly in the morning, and wasn't able to work again on it until this weekend.

Anyway, if anyone is interested, I divided every shader effect in a text file (check in the mod folder or on github).
I notably had to remove a "spec"/ "shape":"pointlight", because it can't use "useArmyColor".
If anyone knows how, I'll gladly make an update.

By the way, if someone from PAMM could accept the pull request, that would be awesome™
(Hope I did everything right this time )

I would prefer it to replace the secondary color, because I like playing as gray/red, and having a completely black/gray explosion is boring...

Also, there are no gray or white secondary colors atm, so you will only have colored explosions if you pick secondary.

I kind of anticipated this request, although I had another mod in mind (the uber cannon color one).

That's why I wanted to know how to create a setting to load a different file depending on it's value, like :

• Default/vanilla effect
• Primary only
• Secondary only
• Mix with mainly primary
• Mix with mainly secondary
  
• ...

So I created a topic here.
But it is unknown territory for me

I still think, to be honest, that the mainstream goal of this mod should be to display the primary color, because that's what people see first / the most.

But I know some colors render better than others. Black is definitely one of the worst. Yellow/orange/brown are very close, as red/pink/purple/dark blue.

Also, all effects are best rendered on dark side of planets, because of the light effect on bright side, but this affect vanilla too.

Is this fully compatible with the release version of the game?

Yes

YEA!!

It's so shiny

Yeah, I might have tweaked a bit the effect, and not just replaced the stock colors, by adjusting the intensity.
Reason is, some colors were barely noticeable on bright side of planets :

The shiny was generally more about looking great. It's a fantastic idea, in terms of gameplay and optics.

Explosions in my game seemed a bit too bright, though. Mainly because the white dustclouds have been always showed 'above' the explosion, when they actually were behind. I don't think that's normal?
I hope that sentence wasn't to confusing.^^

edit: Who needs words if he has pictures? Uploaded a screen. And seriously, i love the chronocam.

It's kind of .... hard .... to .... visualize I would say
Do you mean you have the inner glow of the ascending mushroom which above the smoke effect ?

Lol yeah. Added a picture to the post, you almost can't even see the actual explosion because of the dustclouds. Was pretty much the same for all three com's who got killed in that game.

Oh yeah, it's not the effect I was thinking about, must be the one I called "Circle Fog Low Elevation" (effect number 8 in my chart)
Went from
"red":[[0.0,2.5],[0.5,0.25],[1,0]],"green":[[0.0,10],[0.5,1.0],[1,0]],"blue":[[0.0,25],[0.5,2.5],[1,0]]
to
"red":[[10,10],[10,10],[10,10]],"green":[[10,10],[10,10],[10,10]],"blue":[[10,10],[10,10],[10,10]]

If you're willing to test, here's a zip with modified files for just this effect (with 5 /2 /1 instead of 10)
Just rename the file to remove the prefix and copy it over the mod files located at (on Windows)
C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Uber Entertainment\Planetary Annihilation\mods\fr.pa.fr33lancer.TeamCommExplosionColor\pa\effects\specs
Needs restarting PA after each file override

I may do some more testing later

Great, I'll give it a try later.

Wait, it's not the right effect

EDIT 1 :
It's #17 Radial Smoke
"red":[[0.0,2.5],[1,0]],"green":[[0.0,10],[1,0]],"blue":[[0.0,25],[1,0]]
==>
"red":[[50,50],[50,50]],"green":[[50,50],[50,50]],"blue":[[50,50],[50,50]]
It's a bit an understatement that I was a bit mad with this one

It's indeed too bright.
Thing is, I tested each elements separately, then assembled them back together to have the whole explosion.

I was kind of OK with the results, but yeah it needs tuning.
That's why feedback is always welcomed

EDIT 2 :
I think I remember why I put those values quite high.
It's because the effect looks like **** under sunlight.
Examples (with 1 instead of 50):


It totally loses it's colour.
There's nothing that can be done about the effects under sunlight, but I can at least reduce the intensity so it looks OK when not in sunlight.

It's just the secondary effect. Tweaking shouldn't hurt to much?

Try with this one, I reduced it from 50 to 5


The difficult thing about finding good values is that the Commander Explosion animation is made of no less than 20 individual effects.
Testing each one of them individually takes a lot of time (changing value, restating PA, reconnecting to game).

I may do a complete pass on all effects one day

Lol @20 effects. Well, it certainly is one of the most beautiful nukes i've yet seen in a videogame. Uber does now their work.

I'll try and drop feedback tomorrow. It's too late here in germany, and i'm tired as hell.^^