{"id":578,"date":"2014-04-05T18:36:32","date_gmt":"2014-04-05T10:36:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/?p=578"},"modified":"2014-06-20T15:21:57","modified_gmt":"2014-06-20T07:21:57","slug":"ascii-particle-effects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/2014\/04\/ascii-particle-effects\/","title":{"rendered":"MORE ASCII Particle Effects"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After spending a couple weeks completing item art, next up was assigning particle effects to the 200 or so weapons. Last time I posted about ASCII particle effects (<a title=\"ASCII Particle Effects\" href=\"http:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/2014\/03\/particle-effects\/\" target=\"_blank\">not long ago<\/a>) was regarding the &#8220;first pass&#8221; at them a few months earlier, when the work was more about doing &#8220;what I felt like&#8221; and thought would be interesting (that and cleaning up and tweaking a library of existing scripts from my other games).<\/p>\n<p>This time around was quite different--with the semi-final item list ready, it was time to assign all the particle effects to weapons, filling in any holes as I went along.<\/p>\n<p>There were a lot of holes ;)<\/p>\n<p>And of course a lot of other tedious work to do along the way, like ensuring there is a proper visual progression for effects used by early and late-game technologies, ensuring effects for similar weapon types are consistent with one another, etc. This would be much less of an issue if working with a small set of weapons, but there is quite a lot choose from in Cogmind, being a very dynamic component-based system.<\/p>\n<p>Particle scripts currently contain the following number of different styles for each category (the number in parenthesis was the original count when starting this most recent phase):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>29 explosions (24)<\/li>\n<li>21 lasers (12)<\/li>\n<li>14 ballistic projectiles (7)<\/li>\n<li>12 EMP projectiles (0)<\/li>\n<li>12 melee attacks (0)<\/li>\n<li>11 special launchers (7)<\/li>\n<li>8 rockets (5)<\/li>\n<li>5 plasma blasts (4)<\/li>\n<li>3 special weapons (0)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Remember that these are unique styles, <em>not<\/em> recolorations, the latter being easy to do with a single line of script so they don&#8217;t count as &#8220;unique&#8221; (weapon sub-variants do generally use recolored effects for easy recognition, however).<\/p>\n<p>I compiled a few new ones into a single image:<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_580\" style=\"width: 400px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/cogmind_particle_effects_02.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-580\" class=\"size-full wp-image-580 \" title=\"Cogmind Particle Effects\" alt=\"cogmind_particle_effects_02\" src=\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/cogmind_particle_effects_02.png\" width=\"390\" height=\"316\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-580\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">An energy weapon, missile blast, and a couple EMP weapons.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>The animations are tough to catch in a good screenshot (I believe I took some better ones last time), so here they are in gifs, along with a few more:<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_581\" style=\"width: 230px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/cogmind_weapon_particle_effects_04.gif\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-581\" class=\"size-full wp-image-581 \" title=\"Cogmind Weapon Particle Effects 4\" alt=\"cogmind_weapon_particle_effects_04\" src=\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/cogmind_weapon_particle_effects_04.gif\" width=\"220\" height=\"136\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-581\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Firing some cannons and energy weapons (twice each).<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"attachment_582\" style=\"width: 230px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/cogmind_weapon_particle_effects_05.gif\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-582\" class=\" wp-image-582 \" title=\"Cogmind Weapon Particle Effects 5\" alt=\"cogmind_weapon_particle_effects_05\" src=\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/cogmind_weapon_particle_effects_05.gif\" width=\"220\" height=\"136\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-582\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Firing larger EMP weapons, and an explosive missile.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>In total I spent 29 hours creating new particle effects and linking them to various weapons, splitting the time up over a week as it was rather draining. Honestly I think some of the effects are really cool, but more of them could be better. Having already spent a while on it, now&#8217;s a good point to move on since all weapons at least have their own effect. If there&#8217;s time or it seems absolutely necessary, tweaking the effects further after more playtesting will be easy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After spending a couple weeks completing item art, next up was assigning particle effects to the 200 or so weapons. Last time I posted about ASCII particle effects (not long ago) was regarding the &#8220;first pass&#8221; at them a few months earlier, when the work was more about doing &#8220;what I felt like&#8221; and thought [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":580,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[171,62,4,61,12],"class_list":["post-578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","tag-art","tag-ascii","tag-cogmind","tag-particle-effects","tag-weapons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=578"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":586,"href":"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578\/revisions\/586"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}