[REL] PA-FX / Moar Effects in PA [75499]

Hello folks,

Following CRessources mod from @Alpha2546 , he and I decided to put our efforts in common in a single mod to add effects to PA buildings, but also units.

This mod not only gives PA more polish, it also increases readability. For instance if you hover over a base, you'll notice radars way easier. Also you'll notice really easy when a factory is building or isn't doing anything.

Quick look at the deep space radar :


The mod is still a WIP, there are a large number of things that can be tuned, and we'll appreciate all the feedback we can get (feelings / bugs / ...)

V1.0.0
Initial Release
Available on PAMM
Github link

Known limitations / bugs

• Orbital units effects wear off from the unit as soon as its changing orbit, and keep showing on original planet location
• Some models / animation are bugged (Orbital launcher), effect update will be limited until fixed
• Effects cannot be set for "powered on" buildings. Radars will still show effects when powered off.
• Some other mods may conflict with this one (I noticed "Circle to Line" mod for instance)

Thanks to @Alpha2546 for his awesome ideas
Thanks to @bgolus for his support

OH MY THAT LOOKS AMAZING ASDFLKJASDLKHASD;FJK

My OCD is screaming at the placement of the middle lights not being centered between the first and last ones

This has an awesomeness of Like^2

EDIT:
though I hope you will be fast to support this, as for example the dox changes in the pte will require an update of this, if the dox are part of the mod.
Same for other balance changes.

I think I know the reason behind this choice, it's because of the vanilla model small lights


There was initially only two blinking lights (without the top one)

Believe I've take your OCD into account with placing these lights. If I did center it perfectly then you'd suicide cause then they don't match the white lights and then it'll definately looks off. You will probably calm down as soon as you see it ingame. Just thinking I might be able to change the white spotlights also... I'll look it up don't go crazy please!

I got to say I really enjoyed working on this mod with @Fr33Lancer. We both had almost like the same opinion about how it looks ( not too flashy but subtle and all).

My favorite colour combo's are orange-purple, white-blue (looks Icy), white-red, or black-red. Owyeah and please check out the JIGS! @Fr33Lancer dit a really really awesome job on those! So go

Edit
ninja'd on the @raevn reply

Yes yes yes yes! PA needs more effects and lighting.

Add it to Vanilla pls

"it also increases readability"
When your base gets cluttered this will help considerably and I total agree that this is the way to go "not too flashy but subtle and all"

• Effects cannot be set for "powered on" buildings. Radars will still show effects when powered off.

It will be awesome when you can change the effects for power on/off, i.e. flashing red for off and flashing green for on. This mod is going to be sweeeeeeeet!

I love you guys.

I'm loving it guys keep up the good work! also , if the mod is WIP what do you plan to change?

Let's say there's always room for improvement. This is a first pass.
We can fine tune a lot of things in current effects, like their timing, size, complexity, the intensity of their light on textures close by, etc.
We can also add different new ones, since we used mostly the same one with small variations here and there for the time being.

I haven't had a chance to try the mod yet, but damn that Deep Space Radar looks nice.

It was difficult to find your mod on PAMM because you have put the date wrong in the mod info. I have done the same thing as well. The date is meant to be in the format YYYY/MM/DD for some weird reason that I cannot understand. I guess that it helps with ordering the mods because if you remove the slashes in that format and then order them as if they were numbers and put the numbers in order it would work.
TLDR; Change the date in modinfo.json
Edit: Also, your mod looks awesome as do your others. PA just needs more colours.

Yeah, I noticed that too after
Curse Americans for their strange date format that made me do such mistake
Will be fixed with next version.
Until then, it's still possible to find it by typing text, or using the link in News tab

Included in this month's eXodus mod picks.

I just checked out this mod... I thought you were going for subtle? All the blinking lights, it's a little too much if you ask me.

Well its really hard to get a good balance between too much and to less of the particle effects. There are several ways to change it which are from my experience:

• other animation of the lights (flickering, glowing or something else)
• The size of the lights.
• The brightness of the lights

And especially brightness plays a big part with this. There's a big difference brightness wise between white - yellow or green - navy blue. The trick is to make the bright colours brightness just on the edge of 'okay that looks almost too much'.

Though I do admit that there are some lights that flicker a bit to much: things I want to make a bit more subtle is:

• Air factory and t1 Vehicle factory lights.
• Energy storage en metal storage (the middle light of the metal storage will probably get a different animation)
• and maybe the t2 pgen though I'm not sure about that one.

So my question to you is: What specific units make you feel that its all too flashy or do you have any idea's on how to make it feel more subtle?

Thats awesome! @Fr33Lancer and I put a lot of work in this mod and its great to get this extra recognition. Thanks (from the both of us)!