One thing that I loved in the Order expansion is the asteroids. It would find very cool to see an other visual effect of that type for the next.
What ? I don’t know. Fighting in a graveyard of old broken ships, or close to the asteroid belt of a planet (so with an effect giving the feeling of a ring being seen slitghly above the trench, Big asteroids at the front of the image flying right, and small at the back of the image flying left.Might give a great feeling of deepth). Or why not a big spinning pulsar, which intermitantly sends a ray to the screen and does some damage proportionnal to their size. Or a big swirling blackhole sucking a nebula 5such as Weirld Worlds)
Could be a big starbase at the back with some ships (tiny) flying out of it, or toward it …
Well, you get the idea. It think that landscape visual effects are great additions. (I actually could even imagine a DLC with just a bunch of them… )
a way to get around the “being able to fight in a graveyard of dead ships” problem, just go to asteroids.dds (or whatever it’s called) and replace the asteroids with (small) versions of the ship hulks. they need to be smaller to fit in the spots where the asteroids were, etc.
I often stroke my chin thinking about the best, performance-friendly way to do a true nebula effect, complete with wrath-of-khan style lightning flashes and drifting clouds that partly obscure ships. One day I’ll get a version of that good enoguh to include…
“AI War Fleet Command” has some very efficient background effect. It is made of 6 or 7 layers of pictures with transparency which move at different speed in the background when moving the view point. The order from the top (moves the quickest, but slower than the ships) to bottom :
The planet
3 or 4 layers of space dust, nebula or whatever
I think that there are 2 layers of stars at the very bottom (or my screen is dirty, which could be the case…).
I have no idea of the impact on the machine speed, but it gives a wonderfull feeling of depth. Though the rotating planets (in AI 2.0) or not so good.
There is already a bit of it for the space dust, but with pictures, it would be cool too. For example, I would very well imagine the background with the planet and 2 moons (defending Sirius), with the 2 moons a bit closer to the player and moving slightly quicker when moving the view point around.
Also I have just notices that there is star dust on the same plane as the ships 5it moves at the same speed. I might give a feeling that the ships are drawn on a “dirty” glass. Maybe if that dust was above the ships (Moving quicker) the effect would be better…
I don’t know Wrath of Khan, but yeah, some lighting effects in coulds would looke nice ! (some preprocessed bitmaps with a shadder ?)