New (turret)laser effects??

[Per]

Something like that, yes.

[zamaszysty]

In that case would it be possible just to stretch those effects we have now to the size od the distance between units ? This way it would still be a projectile but so "big" that it would "start" in the attacker and "end" in the victim looking almost exactly as the thing we want to achieve. But it MIGHT get chlitchy it it would be animated flying from "nowhere" and to "nowhere", because i'm not sure if thats not always calculated for the middle of "projectile object" instead of two ends of it.

Another solution would be to make laser shoot large series of the standard projectiles in a tiny part of a second ... this time the "beam" effect would be acieved by lining up short beams that might not look as good as one continous beam, but thats still something else .

My last idea is using somehow the "smoke" mechanism that is used with mortar etc. type projectiles. Those are not only flying in the air, but are followed by a smoke that follows them. IF this would be applied for lasers just with changing the smoke texture (like placing a simple straight line texture there), and of scourse going in straight lines instead of loops like artilery projectiles do

Hopefully my english is good enough ...

[Jorzi]

Well I think the problem with smoke trails is they don't have a direction, which means if we replace the smoke texture with a line, the line won't know which way the projectile is going which could lead to something like this:
//////////////>
instead of this:
==============>
I think that's why the laser of the command turret looks like this:
oooooooooooooooo>
Maybe I am wrong or maybe there would actually be a relatively simple way of coding support for a direction for trails? If that would be the case, it could actually be a quite good solution:)

About having one large beam projectile: I think the sniper cyborg in ntw mod uses this, but there is apparently no way of making it stay still, which means it starts from behind the turret and goes way beyond the target. In other words it looks ugly.

The rapid fire idea migt be somewhat doable, although the maximum fire rate is limited to 10 round per second. This means that if you make, for example, a projectile that is 1 square long (longer than that will propably look ugly) you would need to lower the projectile speed to 10 squares per second, which, according to my calculations from the stats, is less than half of its current speed.

[winsrp]

i made a test here,

I grabbed the flashlight, i put the same laser beam that the laser AA has... and put it fire in rapid fire mode... 0 delay, and with speed to something like 10.000 up from normal 2500 or so... and it looks weird.... not as weird as it looked when I put speed 100, that was a lol.

it does look like if it were a laser... but the cannon has some sort of hiccup when firing, so, it stops for a second and then fires again (this is why i changed the the beam, since with the small flashlight beam there would be holes).

Now even when it does looks like a laser, the problem seems to be the laser fire image itself (laser sprite), since it has like some black and dark green border, that when you fire it you can tell that is made out of small pieces, if it didn't had those, it might look better.

If someone is willing to send me the modified sprite i can give it a test, of if you like the mod with it so you can test with the sprites yourself... let me know.

[Iluvalar]

What ? none of you know that already ?
That weapons is only called a laser because of some real old sci-fi movies that depicted that same sort of weapon and called it a "laser". But technicaly there is no "light" that goes out of those cannon at all. Do not mix the phaser weapon like in star treck and is actually made of photon or other similar particuls with the blaster weapon in star wars that shoot in fact plasma bolt. Yeah indeed, the plasma go trough the accelaration-cylinder which usually contain a laser or another maser... but what actually go out is plasma ! That is why it's make "piew piew" sound and not the constant "fzzfzzfzzfzzfzz" sound you know ! That is what is called "pulse" in "pulse laser" you know !

Ok now... your are asking what is difference with the "plasma cannon" so il'll tell you : the plasma cannon focus on the plasma himself as it's the heat contained in the plasma himself that does the damage. While the flashlight technology rely on the speed of the projectile _only_. In fact flashlights shoot so fast that "air" suffice as a projectile. That's why there is no ammo in a flashlight and pulse laser. Finaly the rail gun do both and shoot a standard round so fast it's actually turn into plasma.

So yes... it's called "laser" but it's just a silly sci-fi tradition. please don't fix it. There is no laser (light weapon) in warzone2100. (for now)

[LZ compromised]

Thanks for the historical reference, but it doesn't really change anything.

Sci-fi weapons like phaser and blaster are good and all that, but last time I checked, noone is turning WZ into Star Trek or SW. The only reason people wanted to change the current laser weapons was expectation based on common knowledge. Run a poll if you wish, you'll see that the first mental image people have when they hear "laser" is a thin continuous stream of (usually red) light.

We know tanks shooting colorful beams at each other are entirely unrealistic (anyway, if you wanted high energy density, you wouldn't stop at visible wavelenght and go straight for X-ray), but realism never was this game's selling point.

[Jorzi]

I think the best depiction of what a laser cannon should look and act like is the monkeylord from supreme commander. At least when looking at the matter from the coolness perspective.
Frome a pure physical standpoint, the most propable wavelengths for a laser would propably be either infrared (pure heat) or something in the uv-xray area. Xray is good because it penetrates the surface but is still absorbed in the object it hits. It also breaks things down at the atomic level because of the high energies of the photons.
Infrared is interesting because there are already quite a good range of hi-power CO2-lasers available in this spectrum (up to 5kW continuous power)
In order for a pulse laser to be comparable with a cannon it would propably need to be somewhere in the terawatt range. I assume that means it would heat up the air it passes through enough to make it glow in a manner similar to a lightning bolt, leaving a trail of plasma behind (now that would be awesome )

Plasma weapons (to my knowledge) are pure technobabble and can be used as an excuse for any kind of fancy looking light effects coming out from the muzzle of a weapon

The railgun is actually a very old idea. The nazis had a few railgun designs during ww2 but they realized that a single cannon would use the power of an entire city when firing so they never built any. It simply means you use electricity instead of gunpowder. The projectile is short circuited between two rails, producing a strong magnetic field which puts an expansive force on the circuit, driving the projectile outwards. The projectile is generally not turned into plasma when flying, at least not intentionally, since solid projectiles have much higher armour piercing capabilities.

[Mysteryem]

I had a mess with weapons.txt as well, but only turned out similar results:


I think that the best method for lasers would be to use hit scan to draw a coloured line from the muzzle of the weapon to the 'hit' for a second or so.

[DRAAK]

I’ll just leave this here...

[Saberuneko]

SC lasers... I knew they were going to appear soon or later...

I personally like more laser tanks on SC than the assault mechs.