The latest update to swarms reveals to me how insanely brilliant the design team is, or at least with the Linux binaries. I am proud to be part of a community where four developers devote hundreds of man hours a week to bring us this game, it's graphics, and community. Here is a screen-shot of exploding 'improved' swarms with 100% effects quality:

Can't beat those explosion effects, baby!

Now where I see swarms possibly headed in the not-to-distant future:

I can't wait!

Either I need to fix my sarcasm detector, or you are really serious about it...
They look like plasma explosions.
Oh, and just wondering, is there a bug with the chat filter or something (FUCKING)?

:(. I thought they looked ok, although they still need tweaking. More contiguous with the trails than with the old explosions, anyway.

The real "improvements" have nothing to do with the explosion effect, though, and more with the randomness of how they're emitted, and the new parameters available for tweaking. It was done more for cap ship usage than anything else. Hopefully that will become clear before long.

In response to Shadoen: Some of it's serious, some of it's a joke. Also, plasma doesn't look blue - if anything it looks like the sun. If you don't believe me, do a Google on 'microwave plasma,' and make some yourself. Oh, and I don't have my chat filter on.

In response to incarnate:
I only have problems with the explosion animation - I just thought that the created image would be funny. The explosion looks very, very weak. If that's only the lowest quality explosion effect, then there's something wrong with the amd64 binary.

Glad it's not just me. The swarm explosions in space do look like badly drawn circles (a bit like missile command). However, has the launch sequence changed? It's been so long since I've used swarms I can't remember, but they look more like they used to originally (which is good). Either that or I'm remembering the v2 swarms to be worse than they were.

One bug I did discover - when firing at asteroids, sometimes the 'explosion' occurs fully within the asteroid, so all you get is a blue line terminating at an asteroid and no visible explosion at all.

Incarnate, the thing is, Swarms are right near the top of the heavy weapons available (and 'Chaos Swarms' really sounds like it should be nasty), so I kind of expect something that *looks* nasty when it hits. Currently, the launch is: wow, that looks nasty, then it hits and it's a bit of an anti-climax. Especially when the entire swarm hits a Collector bot and merely damages it...

It looks blue in halo : )

Funny you should mention Halo, Shadoen, I was about to say that Physhi's projected missile and trail graphics look a lot like a Covenant Carbine...

I don't think the heavy-handed sarcasm is helpful or warranted. "I am proud to be part of a community where four developers devote hundreds of man hours a week to bring us this game, it's graphics, and community." Couldn't you at least stick to the graphics issue?

The whole point of tweaking the swarms, as the devs had explained beforehand, was to reduce with the load that the swarm graphics created so that they wouldn't degrade performance during large-scale battles. Knowing that they were tweaking the swarms, it would have been better just to have said "Hey, the trails are good, but could we beef up the explosions?". The development team has been totally receptive to this sort of thing - I don't see a reason to be so unpleasant toward them.

Also, plasma typically is ionized gas and can be a variety of colors depending on what gasses are present. Lightning is a common example of plasma - a blue/white color to my eye. The aurora borealis features many colors at once. There's also those plasma ball lights that glow blue/purple/red. "Neon" lights use plasma also.

I made those effects primarily for the capship swarms, but Ray asked me to put them in for the normal ones, because he thought they looked better too. So.. I did. <shrug>. I thought the old explosions were pretty lame. I know this one is low-tech looking, but.. again, I thought it was kind of interesting. Oh well.

Anyway, the tweaking goes on, I'm not done with the cap effect, but maybe for the light ships swarms I'll just swap the explosions back to the old effect next week.

For the record, swarms were designed as a defensive weapon for heavy ships, to give them some kind of cover while running like hell with their cargo. That was the original goal. They were not supposed to be insanely uber, like say, the Avalon Torpedo (which will return before long).

"insanely uber, like say, the Avalon Torpedo (which will return before long)."

Soon? I need some new items for my black market. I volunteer to test them :)

I logged on to reply to this thread.

On this matter....I would like it if the swarms could target multiple opponents at once.

The explosion itself isn't so bad as the aftermath; the little blue spheres that sit there and take a while to dissipate.
Maybe if you greatly reduced the time it took for that little bubble to fade out they would look better.

Yay for avalons, boo for devalons.

i kinda like the bubbles, especially when you fire them at a hac, its so cool.

I kinda like the way they look too. It's a different concept for sure. Not everything has to be a huge exposion, the damage effect is what really matters.

Physhi, if you want to see blue plasma try microwaving a CD. The gas within the laser-etched grooves ionizes to become a plasma which looks blue. (Don't try this if you think microwaves cause brain cancer, you can just look it up on youtube)

lit matches make yello (i think) plasma when you microwave them. though givin my color vision it could some other color, still they look cool.

I love the trails. Think the explosions should be way more bombastic and fulminant.
As I agree Chaos swarms should be the ultimate and show off effects weapon hehe.

Bug: swarms "enter" the station when targeted at one and blow up "inside" the structure mostly and not on contact with the skin.

The little bubble wouldn't be so bad if it were actually a sphere, or on the opposite end, more of a random explosion shape. What bugs me is that you can see flat sides to it, like a polygon.

It really does look like missile command. I like it for being 'retro'