Much more epic looking 
! Can't believe such a little change actually changes the entire feeling of the game this drastically (for the better!)
Glad to hear it!
I thought i drop in some "tech" suggestions but i completely understand if they are super long term things or might even never be done, atm i am far more happy if gameplay improves too.
Bear in mind that, first and foremost, this game has to support a
ton of ships onscreen on modest hardware. So things that increase GPU load significantly, or require better GPUs, are not things I'm going to be super keen about doing.
- Explosion effects need to be specified per weapon type (at least) - Not important
- And Destruction effects should be per specified per ShipType - Not important
I am almost positive I'll never do that, and here's why (sorry):
1. Art isn't free and there are a lot of ship types and I'm adding new ones all the time. There might some specific ships that have more specific kinds of explosions that are more impressive or whatever, and possibly there might be some specific weapons that hit with a certain graphic, but that's something Phil and I need to work out as we go.
2. Keeping the number of different explosion textures used to a minimum is
very important for performance. Drawing 100 rotated/scaled copies of the same texture graphic is insanely faster than drawing 10 copies each of 10 different texture graphics. With something like explosions, which for most players are something they see from a very zoomed-out distance, this is a pretty low priority for me.
That said, I do plan on improving the explosion effects a lot, and I very much like your concept of differentiating the shot hits from the ship explosions, but I don't see ever going too overboard with this. The scale of this game makes certain complex effects impossible, whereas in a game with smaller numbers of ships and certainly smaller numbers of ships on the screen, there are a lot of things I might do differently. The price of a huge game like this on today's hardware.
- Ability of the engine to play back png sequences with alpha maps (with a fixed frame rate) Kinda important
Uh... the engine does this all over the place.
I just don't have a lot of good art with varying alpha maps, since most of the graphics were either (crappy) done by me, or (great) designed by Daniel Cook in the early 90's before alpha maps were a thing in commercial games. Some of Phil's upcoming stuff already adds alpha layers like glows around planets, etc, and it's things like this that will be a
huge visual improvement. Patience, please! I know you're really excited about the graphics improvement, and so am I, but I have to give Phil time to actually work.
- Ability to Scale/Rotate effects at random (even effect sprites that have a sequence) Kinda important
Yes, yes, this is already there, too. The electric shuttle effects are a good example of this. I bet you haven't noticed it's a single frame that just gets rotated and scaled. Maybe I should not have told you that.
That's a good example of making an effect that looks really different in a lot of situations, but which is uber-friendly to the GPU. Very important when the GPU has already had to render 4000 ships (and thus 12,000 sprites), plus the interface elements, plus the background and planet, plus whatever shots and explosions happen to be onscreen.
Ability to layer sprite effects with different blend modes (Namely, the explosion would need to be a 2 stage effect --
1. The Explosion itself (sprite or sequence)
2. A glow sprite that grows and fades as the sequence goes (to simulate explosion overglow/dust reflecting light) , this would essentially fake volume light in a sprite engine, depending on how the glow sprite is blended this can mean glow / overglow / darkening etc.
Anything that a png can do, this engine can do. That basically boils down to being full ARGB pixel mode for all images, and that pretty much lets you do any effect. But see my notes above about GPU efficiency. Just bear in mind that these are not freeform sequences that get loaded from the disk, but rather are sequences that I program in or randomize myself.
This would also enable the use of glow effects generally, though they still should be restricted to explosions and weapon effects. One of the blend modes that goes well is Additive Blend, but i am not too much of a engine guy, i know how to create the effect, just not the tech details.
Well, yes, I could use different blend modes from what I'm currently using -- AlphaSourceBlend -- but a lot of those sorts of effects can be prerendered in Photoshop. We'll see. I don't expect to be massively overhauling the engine itself for this, for the simple fact that these sorts of effects either require more CPU or GPU (RAM/horsepower in the case of the latter). There are a lot of cool things that we can do even without using the latest, most expensive tech, and a lot of that just boils down having a better 2D artist than has previously been working on this game. I think we'll be able to achieve some really graphically rich effects without raising the system requirements on iota, and that's my goal.
Aside that - I am absolutely happy with AI war atm ;p No Bug, no problems and finally found a game setting where its really fun ,p
Excellent! I look forward to hearing what everybody thinks of the new art as it is rolled out, too, but right now I just need a bit of patience from everyone on that. Stuff should really get cooking starting at the end of next week, and we should have stuff to show sometime in the following week.
