Engine FX and SFX Alternatives

[Drakohen]

This issue is to address potential changes to both effects and audio assigned to the ship engines in game. It will be split between two different branches.

Effects In the game, there are 3 different "classes" of effect for the different types of player pilotable ships: Light Fighter (LF), Heavy Fighter (HF), Very Heavy Fighter (VHF), and Freighter (FR). This is usually referenced by the use of "smallengine01, smallengine02, smallengine03" on the different effects that make up each engine. By looking at vanilla entries for the house faction engines, smallengine01 = LF, smallengine02 = HF/VHF, and smallengine03 = FR. Using that as baseline, the changes being made are made to align the rest of the engines to vanilla standards.

Audio Similar to effects, some audio references do not align to the house faction engines being used as a baseline. Some examples are freighter sounds being applied to fighter engines or vice versa.

[Drakohen]

Changes have been made. Just needs some testing with a different pair of eyes and ears.

[BC46]

In the summary of commit https://github.com/BC46/freelancer-hd-edition/commit/f297228c6f3c2b2fcdef8f2df9e9fe27d1b6ba06 you mentioned modifying the Anubis engine so it uses the Liberty cruise effect. However, in the diff I can't see any effect-related changes, only modifications regarding engine sounds. Was that intentional or did you want to change the effects as well?

At this time though I don't think we should change the Anubis' engine effect. I do agree with you that a Liberty engine on an Anubis makes more sense since it's effectively a modified Liberty ship. However, in the cutscenes from the final story line missions a lot of the Anubis ships have hardcoded Pirate engines attached to them. Thus if the engine from the original Anubis' loadout is modified, it'll no longer match the Anubis engines from those cutscenes. I definitely think we can modify those hardcoded engines some day, but not until Dethorn's cutscene bug is fixed.

By the way, I haven't tested your modifications in-game yet, but will do that later.

[Drakohen]

The FX changes are a separate branch https://github.com/BC46/freelancer-hd-edition/commit/b9289d2c1051d92a0038721f93a96e7c17c84968. No changes to the Anubis there.

[BC46]

Tested all the changes in-game. I didn't really notice any of the changes from the sfx branch, but it's still nice to include the changes to make everything consistent in the .ini files. As for the fx branch, I did see that the Pirate and BW engines are now slightly larger on the HF and Freighter ships, which is definitely a welcome change.

I left some comments on the sfx branch commit with a few questions. When those are answered, I think the pull requests can be opened and we can have a final look at the changes before merging everything.

[Drakohen]

Replied to comments made on SFX branch: https://github.com/BC46/freelancer-hd-edition/commit/f297228c6f3c2b2fcdef8f2df9e9fe27d1b6ba06#r95094646 https://github.com/BC46/freelancer-hd-edition/commit/f297228c6f3c2b2fcdef8f2df9e9fe27d1b6ba06#r95094825

[Drakohen]

Discovered why a certain Civilian engine FX wasn't working. I'll post an updated commit with the changes so it can be reviewed. Now the Civilian line of ships can stop borrowing from Liberty.

[BC46]

Will these new effects be used for the Starflier, Startracker, and Hawk?

[Drakohen]

Yes since there is only one engine effect unlike the others which have a 1, 2, and 3. LF, HF/VHF, and Freighter

[BC46]

Will the effects be attached to the engines in a future commit, or do I have to do that myself when testing?

[Drakohen]

I've already did the commits for both with trails and without

[Drakohen]

I stand corrected. I didn't push the commits from my desktop app. Now I did. Silly me.