And anyway ALE stands for Alchemy Engine.... Made by DA, hardcoded by DA!
(Look in EXE for Alchemy.dll for more info)

I've been looking (trying) to find out what tools were actually used - I thought alchemy was property of Intrinsic.And I've found Havok SDK mentioned in connection to freelancer and digital anvil. If anyone would like to set the record straight,eg what tools were used and what are the core components of freelancer's effects,please have at it

I think the bunny's better!!

"home sweet home in Omicron Gamma...i am a Corsair!"

Bet the Bunny doesn't lag the server as much as a beam weapon..

Ooooh... I have a way to do this!!!!

1. Make a custom CMP, consisting of a very long set of squares with alpha-channel, glowing textures on them (so that the edges are properly blurry and it looks like a rounded cylinder). Make it... oh... I dunno... maybe 2000 units long.

2. Make the weapon fire said CMP as its projectile. Make the projectile move very, very slowly. Give it a refire rate that's slower than the time the projectile stays alive.

3. Use FLModel Tool to resize a copy of crate_blue.sur (it's a box) so that it's the same size as the "beam"... so that now the "beam" will have a valid SUR (for determining hits).

And... voila!!!!! You'd have a beam that looked suitably large and impressive, functioned as a valid game object... caused no unusual lag... and would disappear as soon as it struck a valid game object!!!

This sounds interesting,
If it had a very low refire rate, would this mean that if you flew into/across the beam you would be unlikely to take damage from it?

It sounds as though you have made this Argh, is it possible to have a look at it?

If you flew into the beam, it'd register a hit, because it'd be an object, not a point. FL handles projectiles (beamspears) differently than it does things like missiles. Missiles are well-known to cause lag in large numbers, because they have a SUR that's being checked by the engine repeatedly, to see if a collision has occured. So... basically... hitting the "beam" anywhere should cause a valid collision to occur.

I haven't built one yet, but I'm 90% certain that this approach would work just fine, so long as you didn't have too many of them flying around at once. For a capship with a monster-sized anime deathbeam... this would probably be a great approach.

lol..i want to see the bunny with the beam weapon, in fact, if you put the beam weapon in its hand it will look like a light sabre.
I knew the thing about the bunny wasn't offtopic in this thread..see.. it all comes together

Argh i think i've proposed that specific beam solution before,i think the concerns raised were;
1.the "beam" will appear instantaneously,in its full length
2.the beam will be destroyed on contact,instantaneously
3.the beam will 'disconnect' from the launcher at a rate dependant on relative speeds

Now lets get cracking on those .ALE files

@Cold:

Yes, those things would be true... but it'd look right, if the ships were slow and couldn't change their vector quickly.

I'm pretty sure that this is how it was done for Freespace... the cap ships (which are the only things that shoot the giant beams) don't move, if I recall correctly. The only difference there was the persistance of the beam.

And... you could somewhat fake even that... give the beam object a very short lifetime (say, a tenth of a second) and then a short refire rate to match. It'd probably look and feel just fine in SP then, and possibly OK in MP, so long as this wasn't something that every ship carried, just special capships.

At the very least... this could be a very valid way of replacing ALEs, and certainly worth looking into as a method there. If nothing else, we could do custom missile flares and other things like that very easily with this method... so I'm going to evaluate what happens with DcDtOcOtEcEt texturemaps in the game engine... I have a feeling that this method's not particularily useful for WOS, but it may have some direct usage in the next project I'm contemplating after this...

Edited by - Argh on 3/26/2005 1:38:03 PM

I don't know about FS 1 but I know at least some of the capships in FS 2 moved and fired the big honkin' beams. Just a point

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What is this thing with the armored Rabbit?

Thats one of my trademarks.

Glock36
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