changing setting of alpha color of lasers?

[ninekorn]

Hi,

i was wondering if there is a setting that we can use for energy weapons color alpha setting, to change the alpha setting to less transparency, as they appear transparent compared to the other weapons when fired. By using a transparent background with no colors and alpha of the backgrounds nebulas/stars at zero, i am able to nullify the stars atmospheric color change when getting close to a star, and by having a transparent background, the backgrounds become white 255/255/255/255 when ingame, which makes it possible to swap the white color for black color with a shader to make the backgrounds black again, from inside of my engine. Also, using transparent background for the nebulas-generic/nebulas-special/stars, i am able to nullify the background color of those nebulas to completely white 255/255/255/255, which makes it possible inside of my engine, to completely modify the backgrounds look of void expanse... The only problem, are the weapons with transparency, which cannot be seen ingame anymore due to this. I can see the particles of the weapons and weapon hit effect, but the weapon muzzle effect and weapon ray are originally set with transparency which i can't seem to find the setting to change that. Because of that, when firing a laser, we only see the particle effects but no ray when firing with no objects/decorations underneath of the player.

Are there any settings for particle speed and ray transparency that we can change in the xml files of items/weapons?

Otherwise, i will try and develop an alternative, or scrap the idea of using transparency inside of void expanse. I will try and provide screenshots putting a visual on what i am explaining so that it's easier to understand.

thank you for the help,
nine


Edit:

screenshot of menu with transparent background and without the voxel virtual desktop. The background looks white:


screenshot of menu with transparent background and with the voxel virtual desktop. I replace the white background with black color in the shader:


screenshot during gameplay with transparent background and with the voxel virtual desktop. I replace the white background with black color in the shader:


screenshot shooting the laser over the station floor and we can see the laser:


screenshot of gameplay without the virtual desktop. The background is white:


screenshot of gameplay shooting laser in the void. Here, the background is transparent, but is showing white in game, but the laser is not 255 alpha and i cannot seem to be getting 255 alpha even when using 1.0. For instance, when setting the color of the beam to red at 1.0 and alpha at 1.0, i am not getting an opaque laser as there seems to be some internal alpha less than 1.0 in the logic of the laser ray texture.

Code: [Select]

<ray>
<width>0.65</width>
<textures>
<texture>
<diffuse>projectiles/beam_fx-mod1.png</diffuse>
<color>1.0;0;0;1.0</color>
<speed>1</speed>
</texture>
<texture>
<diffuse>projectiles/beam_fx-black.png</diffuse>
<color>1.0;0;0;1.0</color>
<speed>0.5</speed>
</texture>
</textures>
<particles>
<!--
<particle>
<color>0.0;1.0;0.0;1.0</color>
<density>5</density>
<size>0.2</size>
<diffuse>projectiles/particle_01.png</diffuse>
</particle>
-->
</particles>
</ray>
Because of this it seems, we cannot see the laser, we only see the particles from the laser that i added in xml script to see where i was firing as the particles seem to be opaque at 255 alpha or 1.0 alpha. This is the problem that i am describing. Without that laser transparency issue, my whole idea of replacing the background with living objects with physics inside of the virtual desktop would be a dream come true. Without fixing this laser transparency, i might be forced to only use the voxel mode without transparency modding:


Edit-14-september-2022: I just noticed while adding the code snippet above that i can add multiple "<texture>" to the "<textures>" section. Let me test some more here to see if i can achieve a 255 alpha or 1.0 alpha by just adding more "<texture>" section to see if i can have a more opaque laser ray when multiple textures are on top of one another.

[ninekorn]

nevermind for my post here. as per my youtube video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw1XpB2OBKg&ab_channel=SteveChass%C3%A9 i was able to remove the stars completely from being generated at server start, so i don't have issues with internal color tempering with the background anymore when using stars with that bloom/contrast effect when getting close to one, which makes it easy to concentrate on background color change and laser color, which were really causing an issue when getting closer to a star. With the stars gone, i don't have color contrasts when getting close to no stars as there are none. But it involves changing Void Expanse generation scripts.

I just realized this after 1 week trying combinations of colors after combinations, after work, of trying to fiddle with the laser colors and nebulas/stars background colors and c# directx11.1 hlsl shader to no avail... anyway, i know where to concentrate my efforts now.

It shows that i've been out of modding void expanse for a few months, i had completely forgotten that i had developed that alternative of nostars as shown in my youtube video. I didn't remember i had given up on trying to keep the stars/nebulas. Now i can't say i didn't try with the color combinations that i have tried over a week. I just can't seem to be able to make the lasers black and opaque, it just won't work, and i needed them black since my background was white, but whatever color i put them when flying over a white background and they never were opaque and taking in the white color and because of that my sharpDX shader couldn't make the difference between both of them and it's worse near a star with the bloom/contrast effect when getting close to one it would break the color setup i had in the shader. But now i've got to find a working backup of that project as there are none that works correctly.

nine