[WIP]Bigger Explosions

Wait, wait, wait, stop this. I don't want this in my thread.
I wanted feedback, I got it.

the nuke missile feels like a massive missed opportunity with your new lens flares and spiffy trails, it could look really cool.
on the subject of nukes, i don't really like yours too much, its too out there in the wrong ways, i suggest taking the regular nuke explosion, making it slightly bigger and a bit more yellowy glow at the beginning, with a less intense, but longer lasting soft cloud at the end of it. also, a massive shockwave.
i noticed that water explosions were on your to-do list, and i think you could just switch the submarine explosion and ship explosion (making em bigger of coarse) and slightly blue up the new subsplosion so it looks underwatery.

So here is the plan that I will try to follow:

- add smoke to all wrekages
- make large buildong explosions beautiful
- make t1 land units explosions beautiful
- make unique explosions for large units (Omega etc.)
- make orbital and air explosions
- do at least something

Life happened. But there will be updates at some point.
@Alpha2546 I need your advise how to make some stuff.
Something like "dust spawns on random points inside a circle and then being pulled to the center of the cirle".
Because, as usual I have a great idea and no idea how to make it.

"useRadialVelocityDir" : true,
"velocity" : -100,
"type" : "SPHEROID",
"offsetRangeX" : 100,
"offsetRangeY" : 100,
"offsetRangeZ" : 100,

Probably the important bits that you need. The 'useRadialVelocityDir' being the most important. It essentially fills in the velocityX, velocityY, and velocityZ values for you according to where the particle is spawned relative to the origin of the effect. A negative velocity simply inverts that direction and makes the particles come towards the origin.

Ok, thatnks, and how many particles I can create without making lags on mid-end pc?

Wow I do not even know that. From what I have found, as long as you keep it bellow 500ish for rarer effects, its pretty decent. It is actually possible to crash PA with too many particles though. Case in point my rainbow heart nuke mod. I think it generates a few thousand particles per second, and PA handles that fine, but as soon as you launch lots of nukes at once it tends to crash. Probably a graphics card limitation more than anything.

A general rule of thumb, try to make the effect you want, but also try to not use too many particles. If you use the right technique, you will probably end up with an acceptable amount of particles.

So yeah what @dom314 has said you basically want an implosion instead of a explosion. The tricky part is having a few random ones at some random points. I recommend using the linkindex for this. Kiwi's implosion effect of the legion mod has some stuff that you want to use. Unfortunately I can't tell you about it in detail cause it would take a seriously long post to explain it properly.

I just recommend analyzing some stuff you need. You'll begin to figure out the shaders, textures and their movement. In your specific case the attached file should have everything you need. This is made by @killerkiwijuice. Incase he doesnt like me to post this stuff i'll remove it and back you up in some other way (though im sure kiwi won't mind).

On the particle performance. Its pretty damn good. You can really do some crazy stuff with particle effects without effecting performance that much. 9/10 computers won't even notice to extra gpu stress. Don't worry about it too much. I don't know what kinda of gpu you have but i have a 270X and its Fine. Also just think about how much the effect is going to be used ingame. A planet smash is wayyyyyy more particle intensive however its only used rarely while an ingame explosion is taking place every 10 seconds after 4 mins. thats a big difference performance wise and something to keep in mind.

BTW on a different note. I recommend using @dom314 python scripts to update your files easily. It needs some figuring out in the beginning but you'll be able to update your mods withing minutes. This is something I recommend when you start touching those unit.json files.

linky https://bitbucket.org/DomDomDom/

I suppose if there is sufficient interest, I can write up a tutorial.

nah I don't mind but nicb1 might

Played some (a lot) Battlefront recently.

wow much sparks
so cool


Might be too much for t2 buildings.

And this mod still alive, sort of. I was doing a bigass mod that adds smoke to every wreckage and stuff, but it can't work with mods that change units, and I like these mods, so I'll stick to .pfx modding, as I originally planed.

Also I completely screwed my "studying is school thing" by being almost always ill, so I might never finish this mod.

So I found nice a way to add some smoke to wreckages - there no smoke from wreckage itself, but there small smoking debris. And it doesn't look stupid when wreckage is destroyed.

Update - Effects for buildings. Everything looks like in vids above, except sparks for large buildings are different.

Nice work man, I love this mod!

I'll continue to show everything in my mod here, so here is current large building explosion:



It's not really finished - needs some tweaking with sparks timing, and rolling smoke thing is too damn low. And it needs to be faster.

Since smoking debris don't really work with orbital station - it probably will have Helios-like explosion with dropping from orbit. Because it's awesome.

Well I had more time than I expected, here is new Helios explosion, once again inspired by Battlefront and Star Wars in general.

I noticed that some impact effects are too small to actually see them. For example, when Anchor shoots air factory, you can't see anything because it hits the center of the building, and not the platform on the top.

i think you should increase the drag on those sparks. They kinda fly out into space.

Mod updated with latest versions of Helios explosions, Anchor and Helios hit effects added.

I'll probably change something in Helios hit effect, however I think Anchor's effect is good enough - mainly because it's actually visible when hitting air factories and unit cannon. Those sparks must fly high to be visible.