Gecko's Tracer Effects

[Daiwilletti]

I can't find the thread where it is explained why there is a mismatch in tracer effects in the effects.xml file, if the new tracer textures are used. Was it something to do with some effects having blendmode = Add and others being Blendmode = Quadsprite?

Or not, I can't remember. IIRC it is something to do with the way the dds textures are compiled.

I would like to get to the bottom of this because the combined effects.xml needs to go with one blendmode or the other. Or could the new textures have a unique effects line and unique texture name, so both sets would work, to retain usefulness for older installs?

[MajorMagee]

Your proposal would work except that you still have to decide which version gets to use the original effect name, and which one gets modified. The loser then requires every reference that uses the old name to be changed to use the new one.

What I'm doing in my version of the combined effects.xml is to keep all the duplicate versions in the file with modified names by adding an x, y or z at the end. That way if I notice something is broken or looks bad I can easily swap the offending version for one of the others until I get it looking right again.

What I really wish we had is a preview editor so you can run the effects animation outside the game to see what each one is doing.

[Daiwilletti]

Your proposal would work except that you still have to decide which version gets to use the original effect name, and which one gets modified. The loser then requires every reference that uses the old name to be changed to use the new one.

What I'm doing in my version of the combined effects.xml is to keep all the duplicate versions in the file with modified names by adding an x, y or z at the end. That way if I notice something is broken or looks bad I can easily swap the offending version for one of the others until I get it looking right again.

What I really wish we had is a preview editor so you can run the effects animation outside the game to see what each one is doing.

To me, I don't see there being "winners" and "losers". There are the old effects, and the new, improved effects. However the old effects still have a habit of cropping up in various places. So I think of it as "original" effects which would keep their nomenclature, and the improved set which could have, as you suggest, some sort of tag indicating a modified effect. In addition the new texture would need a different name too.

A preview editor would be fascinating and I would probably be forever wanting to check things!

Hey Daniel, are you about? What are your thoughts?

[MajorMagee]

What I'm currently doing for a preview is to modify AvH_Me_262a1a_U4.xdp. I change the gunstation entry to something like

MuzzleFlash="fx_ac_Light_landing"

to test the different effects by firing the cannon while sitting on the runway. The effect manifests itself on demand at the end of the extended gun barrel, so I can see what it does.

It takes a lot of restarting the game to look at each effect, and I have almost 7000 of them to go through.

[MajorMagee]

What I'm currently doing for a preview is to modify AvH_Me_262a1a_U4.xdp. I change the gunstation entry to something like

MuzzleFlash="fx_ac_Light_landing"

to test the different effects by firing the cannon while sitting on the runway. The effect manifests itself on demand at the end of the extended gun barrel, so I can see what it does.

It takes a lot of restarting the game to look at each effect, and I have almost 7000 of them to go through.

It turns out that I was able to use this trick to go through the ones that needed checking at a reasonable rate using an install on my SSD that would load and start the game in just about 10 seconds. I was typically averaging about 2 effects per minute.

The sifting I did was first to eliminate complete duplicates, and then the near duplicates that only differed by the view distance ( always chose the one with the higher value), or the use of a dds versus tga texture (all the tga references should be gone now).


I went through checking and selecting the Particle Effects, Track Effects and Shockwave lines first and went through the Group Effects last.


The trick of using AvH_GR_Me_262a_1a_U4_JV44 and editing the entry for MuzzleFlash="fx_gunblast_Air_50_75mm" in the xdp worked almost as well as having a dedicated effects editor with a preview function. For most effects I could edit the entry, start the game with the aircraft sitting on the runway, and fire the gun to see the effect centered on the tip of the long gun barrel. For Track effects I needed to be flying to properly see what it would look like. Some of the group effects, like exploding aircraft and fuel leaks needed to be seen in motion as well. A few like ship wakes and funnel smoke needed to be moving, but more slowly than flying, so for those I had to taxi around on the ground.


Some of the group effects refer to other group effects, so I had to be careful to track those back to the lowest level and make my decisions about which version I was going to use before looking at the higher level groups. In most cases my choice about group effects was to go with the one that had the highest level of complexity to produce a deeper/richer simulation experience.


I had to chase down a few missing texture files from the various installs to kill the last of the black squares (my FX folder has 622 files in it now).

[Daiwilletti]

Well done that man!