Here we go at last! I have decided to release a portion of the visual content which will be included in the Last Stand mod as a separate mini-mod, ready to be merged at your convenience with whatever is your current content of choice.
The background of and reason for this mod is simple - I am not satisfied with explosions in either vanilla game or improved versions of several graphic mods out there. The concept of this feature is that a battle should tell a story - when hundreds of ships are pounding at each other with weapons of incredible power, I wanted to see that power reflected directly on the ships themselves. I wanted to see pieces breaking off, sparks flying into space, thick smoke and fire billowing out, atmosphere escaping from cracks and finally, a glorious detonation befitting something which has fought hard, and lost.
However, words can be cheap - I have a preview video of what I meant by "carnage in space", one of the early names I had for this mod, before it got merged into the Last Stand. It's called "Face of War" and this is how the combat will look like in the Last Stand mod. Ok, I'll shut up now and hope you enjoy it!
Preview video (standard quality) download here: Mediafire(30Mb)
Streaming video (YouTube):
Also, here is a new preview video showcasing the new ver 1.0 effects: Mediafire (29Mb)
And on Youtube:
MOD DOWNLOAD: Volumetric Damage & Explosions Effects ver1.2 (Mediafire, 14.04Mb)
COMPATIBLE WITH SoaSE 1.18/Entrenchment 1.41
Entrenchment FIX
This fixes a bug where racial explosions wouldn't show up in the Entrenchment version. Keep in mind that due to the nature of the necessary changes, the currently available Dynamic Battle System version is no longer compatible with this mod. A new version of the DBS will be uploaded in its respective thread.
Download: Volumetric Damage & Explosions Effects ver 1.2 - Entrenchment fix
Version 1.2 change log
-added new explosion effects for all three factions. Now Vasari ships explode in a different fashion than Advent or TEC. Vasari explosions are green tinted while Advent are more to the purplish side.-added new explosion sound effects for all main ship explosions. The effects are more numerous now and have a greater variation/complexity-removed bodies from spilling when a ship is critically struck. Bodies still float around for a short while after a ship is destroyed-optimized ship explosions for heavy duty battles. You should notice a lot less of a FPS drop when lots of ships blow up in a short amount of time
KNOWN BUGS/ISSUES:
None.
This version is meant to be merged at will, so merge away, just credit me. The preview video includes improved particle effects by Bailknight. To merge this mini-mod with others, install those mods FIRST, then overwrite the files with the ones from this mod. Note that if you have any special explosions listed in your .explosiondata file, they will be overwritten. Also note that if your ships .entity files invoke any explosions of non-standard names, you will get a minidump, so take that into consideration when merging.
A final note - I am very much interested in hearing how this performs on your machine, so you are welcome to comment upon that and don't forget to include your system specs! I also playtested this for a few hours and so it should be free of error, but if you do notice something missing or odd, do tell.
This much from me for now, hope you'll like the new stuff!
That's strange. And it shouldn't happen, as the mod does not touch any ship .entity files. I'll do some testing ASAP and see if I can duplicate this.
On a side note, version 1.2 will have an updated and optimized version of Bailknight's Effects mod as well as a whole palette of new destruction sounds (for example, instead of two explosion sounds for frigates and cruisers and two for capitals, there will be a total of six for smaller ships and four for capitals) with far more detail and variety to them.
Manshooter,
Once again, fantastic work my friend. I cannot wait to update 7DS to the 1.16 Sins/Entrenchment not only because people want it, but so I can showcase the newest release of this mod. I though your explosions were awesome before, but now they are breathtaking. My congrats to you.
Also, don't know if you downloaded 7DS 2.0, but I pay special homage to you in one of my loading screens. Congrats, and keep up the good work. I do hope the Atlantians and Xin can meet in battle some day.....
DANMAN
It could be because they can no longer attack non-structures in the latest patches. Try attacking a module or starbase.
Oh no, my plans for galactic domination over my brother have been thwarted!!
i wonder if its the same for the other races' version of the torpedo ship?
actually i just realised that they work in the mad scientist mod, which led me to dl this one since idont always want the extra research and planets. i will try with vanilla sins with no mods. hopefully the torpedo ships work. i looked through the changelog for entrenchment 1.02 and didnt see it mentioned,
Well, in any case, the Volumetric mod does not alter anything related to torpedo ships. Not even effects since I haven't had time to make new ones, that's for the next version.
Question ManSh00ter do you have a 1.16 mod integration compatible version yet?
i'd like to use this for Fires of War
Is Space Carnage in yet?
soor,
from the OP
harpo
aren't corpses a bit too big related to ships? O.o
If they were truescaled, you wouldn't be able to see them, or rather, they would look like dots. The current size is pretty much an optimum compromise between size and visibility.
Future versions *may* see them scaled back, depending on player input (so far more people like them than not) and will be available as optional add-ons, so if you find them immersion-busting, you will be able to leave them out.
Also, for the Last Stand, the only time corpses will spawn will be at ship destruction, because otherwise you would have humanoids spilling from Xin ships.
i've got another question for you: i hadn't much time to play the mod now, so i couldn't verify it, but are corpses treated like debris? what i'm wondering is: do corpses stay flying in the space (like a space graveyard) togheter with ships debris?
Not as such. I kept the corpses very low poly, but for now I wanted to minimize the performance impact so the corpses dissappear after a while. They are linked to the fragmentation system, so when those explosion fragments go away, so do the bodies.
I do plan on linking the models to debris, because tests have shown that the performance impact would negligible, if any at all. So yeah, you'll have that space graveyard feel.
that would be very nice XD i'd like to have a space graveyard as desktop wallpaper XD
Just a question... I've played with this mod a lot and I NEVER see the type of explosion at 0:48 in the first video(the one with the waves, not full rings) and was wondering if possibly it won't show on 'highest' settings or something? I always play on highest and like I said never see that type of explosion so I was just wondering.
That's the original capital ship explosion, the newer version has two other types added - however I have noticed that the Sins pseudo-random generator seems to strongly prefer some types of entries over others. In other words, with three explosion types to choose from, it rarely chooses the one you pointed out. But it does happen. You just need to blow up enough capital ships and you'll see it - eventually.
Btw. I also play on highest everything and it shows up just fine, only rarely, that's all.
Ah ok.. I've also never used this mod without bailknights active as well so I figured maybe that had something to do with it.
Hey Mansh00ter,
Thanks for this great addtion to SINS! Play an epic game last night with the mod. Had some issues late game I thought I pass along.
Was playing a 3vs3 last night. Towards late game when the fleets are huge I had some rather large lag during battles. Ive been using your older version untill last night. Anyhow, Im running a Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5 processor/4gigs RAM/Nivida 8600 GT. I think it may be due the sheer amount of junk produced during big battles. Also the corpses seem to be hard to spot for me. IDK, the are super dark on my machine.
Just thought I pass that info along to help you optimize it a bit for slower machines and such. Thanks again for the hard work!
I ran into this same problem, and coincidentally, I have the same specs. It only got really bad, however, when a lot of stuff gets destroyed in a small period of time. For instance, one of my allies used Last Resort on the TEC starbase while surrounded with a large fleet. There was a TON of debris after that, which slowed things down noticably. The same thing happened when my other ally used 2 Marza missile barrages at the same time. It was very fun to watch, but again, it slowed down quite a bit.
Also, and I think this has more to do with Bailknights stuff than yours, when ships get focus fired late game, their shield have a tendancy to go completely opaque and you can't see the ship underneath at all.
I love this mod! Thank you so much!
Yeah, that's the price one has to pay for the visual carnage. I will continue to optimize the mod, of course, but a slowdown when a large number of ships is destroyed in a small window of time is more or less unavoidable unless you got a really powerful system. In that regard, do use the latest version of the mod because I reduced the ammount of polygons rendered for the fragments by allmost 50% per explosion, so it should definitely help.
I am very interested to hear how it performs in big battles now, Kyogre12, you are running the latest (1.13) version, yes?
The good news is, the lag should last only for about 15 seconds, as that is the lifespan of all the fragments. Not much of a consolation, I know.
Anyway, hopefully I will be able to reduce the lag further in future releases.
As for the corpses being black, they allmost are - this is to mask their features and make them just humanoid, as one does not want TEC crew spilling out of Vasari ships. Depending on which skybox is active, you can get allmost black but very visible figures (blue skybox) all the way to black and hardly visible (no skybox).
Shields are tied to Bailknights and the formula used is such that it makes them visible on impact - unfortunately that means that they get allmost opaque if exposed to *massive* ammounts of focused fire. I suggest using the latest version as it seems to have better transition and fadein/out than the old shields (the latest version uses newest shader files for shields).
Thanks again for the feedback!
Yep, I have 1.13. The big battles actually aren't too bad, unless you have a lot of stuff exploding in a short period of time. Like the battle where my friend used two missile barrages at once, the slowdown wasn't too bad until all the frigates started exploding. Up until that point, it was a little slow, but definitly still playable. The real bad slowdown wasn't even 15 sec long. It only lasted until the explosions were over, couple seconds tops. It didn't return to pre-explosion speed right away, but it wasn't long before it was playable. And this was definetly a large battle, at least 150-200 ships on each side. And it was online multiplayer, so that might account for some of the slowdown.
It also seems that the Vasari have it worst in terms of particle effect disappearing. I know that they are a result of Bailknight's stuff, but you said that you were planning on optimizing them at some point, so I figured I would mention it. In that game, myself and two friends were doing a comp stomp. I was Vasari, and they were both TEC. I had also set my particle count to 15000, but I believe they were both still on the default one (6000 I think). I started noticing missing weapons way before they did. Eventually I didn't even have explosions or ability effects, but theirs were still working fine.
One last thing. All of the debris gives the Vasari starbase a big advantage. It can use its Debris Vortex to pretty much insta-heal itself if it gets damaged. (it also helps reduce slowdown a little). Not that there's really anything you can do about this, I just thought I would point it out.
Hope this helps
Hoho, I didn't know that the Vortex sucked up *any* floating mesh, I though it sucked up only debris (fragments are not spawned as debris, but through a particle emitter).
And yeah, I can do something about it, like nerf the healing amount per chunk of debris! But I need to wait for the dev version of Entrenchment 1.02 until I can properly test it out. Thanks for the info though.
Dissapearing effects remains an occasional problem - thing is I haven't yet optimized all of the Bailknight's effects, should be in for the next release. Maybe that will resolve the issue.
omg awesome mod great work.
Well it at least appears to suck in everything. I have to go check again, but it definitely seem like it heals faster and more with the mod than without (although it has been quite a while since I played Entrenchment without your mod).
EDIT: I did some quick testing off of a save file I have, and it seems I just imagined the increased healling. It doesn't look like all of the stuff gets sucked in. I definitely didn't see any bodies getting devoured. So, I guess that unless you have ships spawn more actual debris when they are destroyed, I was just hallucinating in the glow of all the pretty explosions. Sorry about that. On a slightly unrelated note, I wonder if it is possible to mod that ability to suck in ships? It just occured to me as I was testing.
Hey Manshooter, I had the same thing as kyogre12. It longer lasted during big battles. My debris lasted longer than 15 seconds though. Usually ends up like you said kyogre12, when ships start going boom fast. But Ive had debris last as long 1 minute. My lag last till most of the debris clears.
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