-Swarm missile effects improved; plus general improvements to effects system
-Border & Hive Skirmish should always end properly

Woo swarms!
http://alec.3rdc.com/chaos_swarms.mov

One thing: Andy and Ray did a bunch of great work to redo the underlying visual effects and particle systems.. essentially what creates all the trails, weapon effects, and so on. Most things came through well, and it allowed me to create the new Swarm trails, which were previously infeasible for various reasons. However, we've since discovered that a few other effects (which were not intentionally changed) have some problems. The Gauss is one. So, please be aware of that.. the only effects we *intentionally* changed are the Swarm missiles. If you run across anything else that doesn't look right (compared to pre-release), please post and tell us so (and how it doesn't look right). Thanks.

I think the Gauss and Plasdevs look awesome with the glitch.

The big yellow guns on the Teradons also have this glitch, and while unintentional, it is way cool-looking.

leave the glitch on the plasma dev cause they fire so slowley that the fps hit is basically nothing. though me and fuge were hitting 2 and 3 fps fireing swarms at ourselfs and eachother.

So now they are true lag cannons as well under certain conditions, in addition to offending the "sensibilities" of a certain demographic in the game. Still, these things look so cool one simply can't avoid firing them.

Heh, the 2 weapons I most frequently use on my SCPs have a glitch. It's cool looking, but I certainly wouldnt like to keep the effect on gauss and plasma devs. One of the main reason I use these weapons on my SCP is that I can fire a 2x gauss, 1x plasma dev bolt that kind of morphs together into one big bolt. It really makes the SCP seem a lot more powerful, and I've always liked how the bolt looked intimidating. However, the glitch makes the weapons seem too dusty now, they aren't combining into a larger bolt, and they don't look intimidating at all.

So, I say keep the old Gauss/Plasma Devastator effect at least for now, or I'll be extremely annoyed. I'm probably the most frequent Gauss/Plasma Dev SCP user in VO right now.

-Nautargos

Ok, this is a great improvement. Reminds me of BSG missile trails. One of those minor improvement things that are major for fun. It actually helps aiming those missiles, I noticed all the trails are longer now.

The neuts are backwards
Edit: Apparently, so are all the other energy weapons

the trails are nice, even for the unintended weapons.

i'd leave those in if i were you.

heck, if i were you, i'd add some of those trails onto spinning roids.

I really like the trails for all the rockets and missiles, can we keep em?

keep the trails! much more fun!

there does need to be a way of turning the trails off. they look cool but them tank my fps.

Yea, I haven't even been in game to test it yet, but the first thing that came to mind seeing that video is "Wow, this is gonna KILL my framerate."

The good news: turning the effects level to "off" omits the trails entirely and only shows the projectiles.

The bad news: turning the effects level to "off" renders energy weapons invisible to the user. Oops. Maybe turning it to "low" might help, but the trails are still spectacular at that setting and probably still represent an fps hit.

I love the trails. Seriously. Keep them in, they're awesome and this is something VO needs.

However, with every graphics and sound setting set to "off" or "1" or whatever the lowest setting is, I still get fps ratings of under 10 with one set of swarms in-sector, and if there is more than one set, my fps goes to sub-5 and has actually bottomed out on the /showframeratetoggle graph.

The built-in GeForce 5200fx 64 MB card in my iMac G5 is, sadly, not enough to really play this game anymore as far as I can tell. It's been ages since I've been able to do anything in Deneb B-12, and I've been noticing fps degredation in my machine's performance when weapons such as AGT or popcorn get used close-up and personal. I hope that it's just a matter of my built-in GPU being crappy, I welcome any GPU-saving hints or tips that you all may have.

Upgrades are the way of things, I know. I'm not complaining. I seriously think that for ANY homing missile, you should have these trails. I kind of like the energy weapon trails as well. Now if you could just have trails behind your ship engines (shorter or longer depending upon your speed), this would be a very, VERY cool graphics effect. Of course the side effect may mean that you need to upgrade the BASE system specs for this game - I can't imagine attempting to play Vendetta with a 32MB card...

FWIW, Chaos Swarms seem to tank it worse than Locust swarms.

time to up the system requirements! oh boy!

For a good time...
Get a bunch of people together and all target yourselves, launching all the swarms you can amass.

The new swarm trails give a fresh meaning to the anti-pirate hail "leave me alone, or I'll stop you!". No threat was ever more literal than that! :)

Chaos Swarms and Locust Swarms both emit the same number of particles, they only differ in color. So, I'm not sure why there would be any performance difference.

We are kicking around ways of speeding up trails of this sort, but I figured for the short-term I would just do what I could to make things look a bit cooler.. hopefully without too much impact on the lower end people (which is part of why only swarms have the trails, for the moment.. wanted to see what the impact was). We tested it extensively on Andy's Celeron 1.3ghz with GeForce 5600 card, but a 5200 would be quite a bit worse.

Anyway, I'll see what we can do about reduced-detail settings next week.

[EDIT]: Actually Lebermac, the best way to make your particular game faster is to disable shaders. I think you can do that in the config menu now, but also if you edit your config.ini, I believe you can set shaders=0 in the "OpenGL" section. If you set it in the UI, make sure you exit and re-run. The biggest problem with the 5200 is extremely slow shader support.