NickPapGr wrote:Fantastic work RK4000, very nice to see that you keep working on this! The quality of your particle effects is amazing.
I have a few suggestions, based on my 'artistic' opinion. I'd be curious to know your own reflections on these points.
One element in Supreme Commander which makes it stand out as a game in general, is its scale.
Considering how immense the sizes of the units/buildings are (in a human scale), I find that explosions and effects better highlight it if their scale is somewhat smaller.
In a way, the bigger the effect, the more it gives the impression that the scale of the world it takes place is smaller.
I personally think, that if the explosions were scaled down (using the same particle effects, which are amazing), they would blend much more in the world of the game, increase the immersion of the scale, and make them feel much more organic in their context.
The same applies with the debris flying to extreme distances, and the duration of some explosion animations (T3 factories for example) that take way too long (in those instances, I find the final effect -where the building/unit finally disintegrates- the most convincing).
I used to have possess some modding skills back in 2008 (I had made a nuke mod for SCFA), as such I would love to contribute to what you do in any way I can.
Cheers!
That's good feedback, thanks!
The plan for V11 is a complete rework of building and naval explosions, where I wholeheartedly agree that they currently have this problem, with scale all over the place, and the timing being... Well, in my opinion, quite bad.
That code is a leftover from the very early versions, and if I'm honest, I really didn't know what I was doing back then.
In order to fix it, it needs a complete rewrite, which will also give me complete control over the size and timing, which I currently do not have due to how it's written.
The difficulty with big unit explosions is that they need to cover said big unit when it turns into a wreck. You want to have the unit hidden by particles/a flash when it turns into a wreck, otherwise it looks very, very out of place. I need to keep that final explosion to do this, but the smaller explosions as the buildings/ships are dying need quite a lot of improvement, yes. This is in the works for V11, so stay tuned!
