Forums » Suggestions
Make Ion Storms Darker
Because darker is scarier. like a deep, darker blue. Bright blue just seems a bit fancy and boring lol.
With bright flashes of lightning and the sound of your hull being pounded by external forces.
+1
I still don't like ion storms though.
+1
I still don't like ion storms though.
+1 to updating Ion Storms. The new dynamic lighting could look fantastic with lightning.
+1 to updating the feel of ion storms. I like that ion storms don't cause any damage, but they should give you a really urgent feeling to get out. They are fun to stay in at the moment.
+1 Ion storms could use a new coat of paint.
A neat visual change may be to make the fog distance by dynamic. Ranging from current distance to 0m every few seconds, giving a kind of undulating wave feel independent of the ship's movement.
Aside from changing their look a bit, they should be graduated to something more than just a nuisance.
How about ion storms disable cap ship shields. This can be especially dangerous when ion storms hit Latos I8 or trident owners travel without an escort. Or perhaps intercepting NPC cap ships.
And/Or, make the exit of an ion storm cause you to randomly jump to another sector rather than just the next one in a somewhat straight line to your intended destination. Even two people jumping next to each other at the same time would go to random sectors (most likely different ones).
Aside from changing their look a bit, they should be graduated to something more than just a nuisance.
How about ion storms disable cap ship shields. This can be especially dangerous when ion storms hit Latos I8 or trident owners travel without an escort. Or perhaps intercepting NPC cap ships.
And/Or, make the exit of an ion storm cause you to randomly jump to another sector rather than just the next one in a somewhat straight line to your intended destination. Even two people jumping next to each other at the same time would go to random sectors (most likely different ones).
I have a lot of specific goals for the look of ion storms that go back many years, but I've always been limited by technical feasibility. For instance "making the fog distance be dynamic" is not an option on older videocards, and is a pretty complex option on newer ones. Per-pixel fog is linear, period. Layering sprites on it to give some sense of depth is about the best we could do and keep it uniform across a lot of common PC cards (and the sprites aren't even enabled on mobile.. too much hit to fill-rate).
So, I want to do a totally new take on Ion Storms, and I know exactly what I want to do, but we need time to develop the effects. That, and they'll only be visible to those with fast, recent PC GPUs (even a lot of recent laptops with integrated chips would probably not be able to keep up).
So, I want to do a totally new take on Ion Storms, and I know exactly what I want to do, but we need time to develop the effects. That, and they'll only be visible to those with fast, recent PC GPUs (even a lot of recent laptops with integrated chips would probably not be able to keep up).
I have 8 cores, 32GB of ram and a new R9 280 itching for some obscene opengl eye candy overkill :)
as far as dynamic fog distance, I was thinking of glFog() and calling that with varying values of distance over time but since we allow different views of the ship outside of 1st person, I guess that really wouldn't have the intended effect. Alternative option may be to do Fog in a shader, giving you much more than just linear fog effects (like exponential etc). Of course, not all cards support opengl 3 shaders, but then that's one of the beauties of shaders, they can be enabled for those that can support them and ignored by those that can't with no degradation of performance.
Maybe instead of using fog of war and such effects, the ion storm replaces the various space dust debris that floats around the ship harmlessly with "ion balls" (like you see floating in the storm already) and it's regular space (no fog). The "storm" aspect causes your radar and ship top list to function on an almost unusably small distance...so targeting ships even if you see them is only possible when very very close.
The game already renders the "dust" so replacing that with "ion balls" should result in no increase in gpu requirements while freeing up a lot by not having the fog. These freed up resources could be used to increase the "ion ball" density in the system and possibly give them their own gradual drift.
as far as dynamic fog distance, I was thinking of glFog() and calling that with varying values of distance over time but since we allow different views of the ship outside of 1st person, I guess that really wouldn't have the intended effect. Alternative option may be to do Fog in a shader, giving you much more than just linear fog effects (like exponential etc). Of course, not all cards support opengl 3 shaders, but then that's one of the beauties of shaders, they can be enabled for those that can support them and ignored by those that can't with no degradation of performance.
Maybe instead of using fog of war and such effects, the ion storm replaces the various space dust debris that floats around the ship harmlessly with "ion balls" (like you see floating in the storm already) and it's regular space (no fog). The "storm" aspect causes your radar and ship top list to function on an almost unusably small distance...so targeting ships even if you see them is only possible when very very close.
The game already renders the "dust" so replacing that with "ion balls" should result in no increase in gpu requirements while freeing up a lot by not having the fog. These freed up resources could be used to increase the "ion ball" density in the system and possibly give them their own gradual drift.
mr_spuck's got a good example. Even in the original release, the FreeSpace2 nebula effect looks better than VO's ion storms. The way it caused your HUD to glitch and flip out made up for the fact that the fog was a really cheap effect.
One hope I've always had for ion storms was that you'd receive damage unless within a given distance of asteroids. This can be explained in that ion storms have an excess of free ions, which would result in a static discharge for anything which represented an electron sink. When away from asteroids (the rock kind, not ice), this sink is the ship itself. When close enough to an asteroid, the asteroid represents the sink, thus protecting the ship.
It's just a thought, as I realize integrating something like this into the game would require a serious modification of the damage engine, as this would represent a specialized form of splash damage.
It's just a thought, as I realize integrating something like this into the game would require a serious modification of the damage engine, as this would represent a specialized form of splash damage.