Thank you all for the compliments!
A few notes on my 'design philosophy.'
I appears that BAT had effectively disabled the group of 4 effects which generated hit debris when bullets struck a plane. These effects are named Debris1A through Debris1D, in the Fireworks folder, with one of the four being randomly selected for each hit event. I presume the disabling of these was because these effects were typically made to create several particles per event. And so a good volley of hits would make a cartoonish cloud of hundreds of these particles. I keep these effects active, and restrict the particle count per hit to just one, and so a plastering of bullet hits will result in not so dense a cloud of particles.
Plane damage smokes are given a uniform treatment in terms of the parameters GasResist, Wind and VertAccel. Stock treatment, as well as that by other modders, has not tended to do so. The result of non-uniformity here is such oddities as diverging smoke trails, resembling a snake's forked tongue, especially when the plane is turning. This goes against nature. Smoke, whatever the source and location on the plane, will decelerate in the slipstream in much the same way, staying pretty much together over a period of a couple tens of seconds or less.
Further to the preceding, I use a rather higher GasResist value than has been. This circumvents the ghastly phenomenon of spinning planes throwing comically wide corkscrew spirals of smoke. A too-low GasResist value means a smoke particle that has some starting velocity will take some time to slow to a stop. It's as though the smoke particle is rather denser than the surrounding air. In reality, a smoke cloudlet has much the same density as its surrounds, and the polluted air comprising it will decelerate pretty quickly when thrown from its source. This higher GasResist requires a concomitant higher EmitVelocity (at an angle to the average stream orientation) when striving to give the smoke trail the desired turbulent irregularity.
I've always found as a bit comical the stock effects which assign to land or water crashes of planes a bomb-like detonation. Indeed, the stock water crashes have explicitly invoked the very same geyser effect given to the 250kg class bomb explosion on water. Not only have I got rid of that explosive aspect, the land crash shock wave over the ground has been got rid of.
The color (from the infamous 'piss yellow'), intensity and duration of illumination from exploding ordnance has been toned down. Having your cockpit lit up by a 500 lb bomb blast occurring a kilometer away, in bright daylight, is rather cartoonish to me.
All the old water ring effects from stuff hitting water, which were short-lived and expanded ridiculously quickly, have been replaced with longer-lived slower-expanding textures that make for grandness of scale, rather than the old impression of toys splashing in a bathtub.
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Topic: WxTech's Effects Pack v1.1 for B.A.T. 4.x (Read 10293 times)
