Fire!!!

[--G()re--]

Ok, I'm so amazed at HW2... it's everything i ever wanted. It's incredable... but...when a ship is from yellow - red health it seems to show off a damage effect with fire and smoke. What do u guys think of it?

i try to kill enemy cap ships as quickly as possible so i dont have to see that damed "special effect", it really is quite horrendous.

:down:

[BuenoMaster]

i honestly dont know what you are talkin about. mainly cuz the 2 times ive been able to play the demo (my comp blows so ive had to go to my friends house) ive been to busy marveling over the weapon effects and such to notice the fire.

btw, shouldnt you want to destroy the enemy ships fast anyway? they are the bad guy afterall

[PeanutR]

Is this because u dislike the fact that there is both fire and smoke in a vacuum and both are behaving like they are in an atmosphere, or is it because u don't think it looks good?

Personally I think can get kinda blocky looking from a distance, but up close I think it oh so purdy :)

On a more signature related note, I'm pretty sure that Einstein said fought and not faught. Or is this some joke I'm not getting?

[Wicked Spider]

i thnk what he means is that the fire looks sometimes like a 2d sprite
if u get a chance to look at a burning ship try to zoom in as far as u can on the fire source and u will see that it doest look like its comming out of the ship it looks more "on the surface" with its base a simple straight line
from far it looks just right though
could be im seeing this effect not how it should be got a Ti 4200

[--G()re--]

PeanutR, I actually think that the effect looks pretty bad compared to all the other jaw-ripping-off effects that the game offers. I mean, have you seen when plasma bombers attack a MS and you see a crater sparking blue plasma on the MS's hull? It looks so awesome up-close and far away. The burning effect (which i have no problem with it being "fire that shouldnt be able to burn in space") simply looks terrible. :wtf2:

I'm running the game on highest graphics at 1280x965 or sumthing on a Ti 4800

about my sig, sorry, guess i cant spell :eye: :read:

[airguitargiles]

theres one thing though..................................................................
YOU DONT GET FIRES IN SPACE OR SMOAK but still it makes the game look much better

[The5thElephant]

Actually you CAN get fire and smoke in space. If the hull is breached oxygen from within the ship can ignite and cause small surface fires. Also smoke is just a lot of particles together, so you can have smoke, all you need is something emitting it such as a fire.

I like the fire effect, but sometimes it does look a bit spritey, I also wish it was a bit larger sometimes. But when the full game comes out you can always mod the damage effects of course and make them look better.

[motiv-8]

What's really neat is when the fires are caused by Bombers. You see the plasma impact, and then there's a gaping, blue-sparking hole with a fire erupting. Veeerry cool.

[Henka]

yeah if the ship is decompressing (due to hull breach) it could teoreticly "burn"
But fire is just what we call a "warm glow" of gasses.. so it could be plasma

And smoke is just residue from a "imperfect" fire.

[Sputty]

21-1
:lol:

[Arkalius]

Fire can happen if it's a plasma fire or if there's oxygen leaking through the hull breach, however smoke, while it would technically exist, would disappate in the vacuum too quickly to be seen.

[Agar_beat]

Is that true? Because as said before; fire doesn't burn very well without O2, therefore fires with a low O2 supply smoke a lot. You can even see this in your own fireplace... If there is a hull-breach or so which vents O2 and a fuel into space, I can imagine that the fire wouldn't have an ultimate amount of O2...

And because there ain't any such thing as wind in space, smoke should be extremely well visible...right?

[Pavonis]

Well, the smoke should dissipate rapidly because the air inside the ship is pushing it out rather forcefully (number one rule for vacuums is that they don't suck anything out, instead air shoves its own aside). I don't think that there's anything wrong graphically or scientifically with the current smoke effect, especially if you compare it to some of the other things in the game that make it more fun or sexier but compromise reality.

[ceejayoz]

33 votes to 1.

I'd say that's fairly conclusive :nyah:

[Agar_beat]

Good point :D

[The5thElephant]

Yeah the fire is pretty much unanimously good.

[SuccendoSLS]

And realistic, although it's true that perhaps the carbon residue (smoke) should dissipate faster under pressure from venting O2. Still, it looks good. Vaguely remniscent of whatever that mars movie was. With the fire. And the space. You know the one.

[Agar_beat]

Red Planet?:baloons:

[Lucky]

The one effect that is *really* unrealistic is the vapor effect of the firing ion frigate (when firing, vapor comes out of the top section of the frigate). There's no matter that would be vaporised by temperature outside the firgate's hull, and it's really hard to imagine that a frigate system would dump vaporised cooling liquid into space, heck even modern power plants that *could* have water delivered to them via pipes conctantly, still cool and circulate their coolant water instead of dumping it. In space, where you can't really aquire any new coolant, it seems silly.
But then again, it's just an SFX. Nothing more.

[--G()re--]

Hmm, well I guess the effect is not that bad then. :turtle: I've played a couple more games and I came to the opinion that it's nice from afar but far from nice. :)

The "vapour" comming off the Ion frigs looks ok to me, although slightly mis-placed at times.

[EldritchFoe]

Originally posted by airguitargiles
theres one thing though..................................................................
YOU DONT GET FIRES IN SPACE OR SMOAK but still it makes the game look much better

Yeah, I see a lot of people making this claim but it is the result of not thinking far enough.

Their logic: there is no oxygen in space, so nothing can burn in space. Well, I'm afraid that's wrong.

Although there is no oxygen in space, there is obviously going to be oxygen inside the ships. Probably liquid oxygen, and probably large amounts of it. Even if you have some form of nuclear engines (I suppose HW/HW2 does) you still need oxygen for the frail air-breathing crew.

Remember the fires are issuing from the damaged ships; as oxygen streams in high concentrations it can fuel a flame. These aren't just burning clouds of oxygen sitting in space. (BTW, a candle flame, in an oxygen atmopshere at zero-g, quickly chokes from its own smoke, which doesn't "rise" in zero-G because there's no "up". However if you keep the flame moving, the flame receives fresh oxygen and leaves a smoke trail, so it keeps burning)

Next, the smoke. As the flame dies the by-products of combustion will form smoke. There's no reason for not having smoke in space, in fact even "empty space" can be full of small dust particles i.e. smoke. The flames and smoke from a burning ship will disperse quickly because the smoke issuing from the ship is at high pressure and moving out to a vacuum.

[thrawniejoe]

EldritchFoe Is right.

[Duo]

well think of ion cannons as this: Ultra hot beam of charged particles, so basically u need a coolant system what if that vapor is just hot gasses from boiling the coolant?

[Panzer Ace]

the only problem with the ion capor is that why dont they just use some thing like a car radiator, after all, space is only a few degrees K above 0, so if they just had some pipes on the outside of the hull for the coolant to run through then they would be fine

[MajorFreak]

57 to 1. j00 = fail

[Kroggy]

58 to 2... damn, they doubled their ranks!