These are some ideas i have in mind for Serenesis Mod, and have already started them. However i am happy to share them with you so long as i credit from the original idea, so heres some things you probably didn't think about:
Dust Trails
It is important to make dust trails very fine and near-transparent, the particles themselves must inherit velocities from the emitters etc. They must also switch off when vehicles start slowing down, and when they go above their altitudes.
I also developed and worked on the following idea, which is a 3-level altitude effect.
Effect1. This is the effect that plays when the vehicle is travelling at its ODF-set Altitude.
Effect2. This effect plays when a vehicle is travelling BELOW its set altitude, and makes the effect thicker, maybe adding deep chunks of dirt or sand into the mix.
Effect3. This effect plays when a vehicle is travelling ABOVE its set altitude, this makes the effect grow gradually lighter.
The above system makes dust trails look MUCH more realistic.
Colouring Dust Trails To Maps
In Serenesis, i will be using recycler variants on a per-map-colour basis, that will change the colour of dust trails for all units within the variant. Inheritance makes this much less heavy on filesize.
You dont want 'dust' on a snow map for example, you might want a more white snowy spray instead? Perhaps to leave a light indent where the snow has moved? However on youre 'mire' map, you want light brown or green dust to be kicked up right?
This is easy to achieve by making a master recycler variant, then making inherited variants that change the dust trails on a per-map basis. It is probably best NOT to use AUTOREG files in this instance, but to use a text file of the recycler list for each map, or by having a 'snow map' recycler variant, a 'grass map' recycler variant etc etc.
Weather Improvements
Maps are nearly always missing weather. Weather will make youre map feel MUCH more interactive, and really brings you into the world. However what if a storm isnt enough? What if you want the weather to REALLY effect the playability.
Wind can be generated with weapon mines or flare mines, which fire a very light magnet ordnance at high speed. You can place these mines on cliff edges in the mountains, or in the valleys of youre map. Granted you will need to use a LOT of them, and they will NOT cope with multiplayer very well, but in single player these will GREATLY better you're gameplay
Lightning flashes that produce EMP's, Damage units, maybe even go for electronic systems before aiming pointlesly at the ground? This can be done with weapon mines and radar poppers.
It is VERY easy to make youre map MUCH more interactive. You WILL see all of this in Serenesis, now maybe you can see it in the 1.3 CP as well :)
I made a similar dust/recy varient system in BZC to make each planet have appropiately colored dust under the vehicles, like BZ1 did.
The weather thing is okay, I have a working lightning storm that damages things already. I also have lava flares that shoot up and can even send ships flying into the air.
The wind could probably be done with less mines then you think, just set a larger radius. The real problem is adding things like fleshstorm did on the first mission, blowing dust/snow across maps :D thats fun. But could lag slower computers, so be careful with it.
This seems like a very complicated way of changing the colour of some dust.
I would recommend that you experiment with textureBlend = "dstcolor one modulate" or one of its variants before creating entire recy variant trees just to fix the colour of some dust.
dstcolor stands for destination colour, it renders effects using the color behind the sprite, so if a map had red rock and white snow, the dust kickup would change colour as you moved over the different terrain/water/sky er anything actually. I have not tried using it for dusk kick ups myself so I am not sure if it would look how you want it to, but it seems a much simpler method of creating environmentally affected effects.
It can certainly look good on the ground planar sprites of energy weaEEEEEEK!!! (nasty sounds of MrTwosheds having his head squeezed by sink plungers and dragged off to the torture chamber again...)
Oh, thats what dstcolor does? Hmm worth looking into.
Maybe those go in a TRN, BZN or similar?
textureBlend does under effect headers. i.e.
[TrailR]
renderBase = "draw_twirl_trail"
textureName = "lightflare.tga"
textureBlend = "one one modulate"
startColor = "74 74 74 255"
finishColor = "190 190 190 0"
startRadius = 0.2
finishRadius = 0.001
rotationRate = 0.9
animateTime = 2.0
emitDelay = 0.08
emitVelocity = "0.2 0.1 0.2"
emitVariance = "10.0 8.0 1.0"
emitLife = 0.9
Yes you would put it into the dust kickup effect. Probably have to tweak the whole effect quite a few times to get it looking right.
startColor and finishColor will still effect it.
I am using the more expensive method to do my dust trails because many other factors will be changing on a per-map weather/scheme basis.
Didnt think of using dstcolor though, i have to admit. Didnt know what it did until then...
"srcalpha invsrcalpha modulatealpha"
would be,
"dstcolor invsrcalpha modulatealpha"?
Feel free to copypasta the dust trails from SRV.
That does not work (my above)...
Hmmm