Beam Glow

what about the glow values in the entity file?

I think what ice. talking about is these values in the ship entity file

        beamWidth 30.000000
        beamGlowColor ffffffff
        beamCoreColor ffffffff
        beamTilingRate 3.000000

within the beam weapons effects.

Failing that, you can adjust the hue and brightness with gimp or no doubt photoshop by going to the "colors" tab.

Also check that you have saved your new file with the channels & mipmaps set up the same as the original Sins ones.

When I played around with those color values in the entity file the beam just vanished ingame, you couldn't see anything at all. I retrieved the value for red and tossed that into those and the whole thing was invisible.

And yes, I've been playing with the colors using photoshop. AFAIK everything is set up correctly as the beam appears to work just fine, it's just not generating the kind of bloom I'm after. That's what I meant when I said I tried making it white and everything... I was editing the actual textures.

Is there a way to edit the actual beam "model"? Perhaps to make it use a specular map or spawn particles?

(I'd like to create lightning/lightning beams as well... but if you can't edit the beam model or how it behaves then that's probably impossible)

Thats strange. I just add Brightness and contrast to the beam Glow dds. and it works quite well.

There is no mesh. for the beams. Or at least 1 that there is access to.There are ones for wave, autocannon, missiles, plasma and alot of ability effects, though thats probably not what your looking for. You may be able to alter the chaos bolt to get the lightening effect, I don't know.

Hmmm. Well, I have two custom DDS files for that beam I posted. I made both of them very wide to try to get more bloom glitter out of the glow instead of a solid stream, in an effort to kind of cheat my way into having more glow. That screenshot there is really as bright as I can get it to be - that's the brightest red I could manage. When I gave the red beam a white core, that didn't glow at all, and when I gave the beam white edges, it appeared completely flat and produced no bloom at all. That wasn't really what I was expecting.

So I converted the Psi capital beam glow into a new dds and widened it, plus made it crimson, and overlayed that over my existing large beam texture which is the standard core. That's how I got it to glow just a little bit. If I have them both be the same texture, there is very little glow at all.

There must be some relationship between these two files that aren't very obvious to me. You were able to get a beam with very high bloom intensity? Do you have a screenshot to show me how high you got it?

That is what I did only I made it green and haven't widend it. I curtainlly wouldn't say its brighter that the 1 pictured. But its deffinitly alot brighter than the original.

Its hard to know what the alpha channel does as it can't be edited. I might try and make a new 1 like a dds-da perhaps and also a cl and see what happens.

Well I can make it fairly bright if I just make it white... but the brightness doesn't generate any bloom glow, or only very little. I'm after that kind of glow, like what my ship has, to produce an aura of light. I'm not sure if that's possible in weapons most games totally neglect having any kind of bloom setting on effects.

It's a little hard to see but I think your beam is generating some glow. Hmmm...

Alrighty, here's a follow-up question.

I am sure that Beams cannot be given glow intensity now.

But what about particles?

This is my very first time really using Particle Forge, and thus my first attempt at making a decent "glow". None of the shaders actually seem to work which was very depressing because there's multiple bloom shaders. They just make everything invisible. Is it even possible to use those on particles? If so, how?

With some tweaking I can probably get this Spectral Javalin to look fairly decent. Which allows me to move on to my next question;

How do you create lense streaks? Like the ones engines produce?

/edit

Okay I think I figured out streaks. Took some work to get them to align horizontally, though... I'll upload a video since you really have to see this thing moving to appreciate it.

For some reason the game is not reading my ogg file. So the Javalins don't have their sounds right now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aln4mWTouv4 (JUST uploaded the video... so if you are checking right as I edited it won't be ready, give it a few minutes)

This any better? Was playing with it for a few minuets trying to work out what does what. This is has no glow texture (alpha is full black) with just the core texture with a wide alpha with a full white center... dosn't look great but its a prototype for functionality.

Awesome! You're getting pretty close to what I'm after. If I can get my beam to glow like that we'll be in business. So the alpha in the core texture is just pure white and the glow is pure black? I'll try this momentarily.

That youtube video is finished uploading and processed. Give it a gander if you are interested in the kind of effects I'm trying to produce.

No, this is the core texture:

(well its a bit diffrent I was testing it without the bloom effect on which make it weaker so i brightened up the alpha but now its insane with bloom on lol)

Okay, I doubled the width of the beam texture, and made the alpha absolutely massive - about twice the size of the beam texture itself. I ended up with this;

Not nearly as glowy as yours is... but making progress. My alpha is considerably massive compared to the beam texture but the beam texture itself didn't shrink at all ingame from my changes. Very curious...

I think I need to play with the actual texture now.

I only switched to the glow off to get a more controlled enviroment (it was obscuring what was happening to the core texture). Adding it back on top might help?

Let's find out. I'm making a better beam texture, and I'll see what happens when I play around with the other one some more.

...

Unreal Tournament 3's editor exports wav files as 0kb. Today just keeps throwing me pain.

/edit

Doesn't seem to be making much of a difference. Might need to play with that texture a bit more and see what happens when I change the alpha a bit.