Long-term suggestion: animated turrets

[Hammish]

Just as the description says, I think it'd be a nice touch (later down the road, just a visual perk here) to have turrets with the ability to act in a dynamic manner.  People spend a lot of time looking at their ship in space, so little things like this can be kinda cool and break up the monotony of space when you're not torching a pirate.

Two possible suggestions might be a simple visual backward-jerk upon firing such as large-caliber ballistics might have, or the ability to make turrets multi-part so as to achieve effects like spinning barrels or lauchers that open/close on firing.  The latter might even be linked through the variables already on equipment like oncharge, onfire, oncomplete, ect.

[Hecter94]

I'd love to see weapons with charging animations.

Similar to how FTL does it, just a simple little visual display on the weapon itself with shows you, graphically how charged the weapon is and when it can fire next.

Would be useful in PvP, being able to watch the enemy ship to see when they're capable of firing their "big bad super weapon" again and would also give you something to watch while dogfighting instead of a boring little HUD icon.

[Lurler]

That might be a good idea in a long run indeed, though so far there is no support for animations for turrets, so you can't really do that.
We really need to finish the game first, and then we can think of adding these little nice thingies

[FlessenGreendart]

While I do like the idea, I imagine it wouldn't really be noticeable on the standard turrets, as they show quite small in game (with the exception of the bigger ones in BTC).

With regard to spinning barrels, I wonder if that could be done with an animated sprite, like the muzzle flash, just re-positioned over the barrel itself...

[Hammish]

That might be a good idea in a long run indeed, though so far there is no support for animations for turrets, so you can't really do that.
We really need to finish the game first, and then we can think of adding these little nice thingies

Yesh, this I understand, thus why I made a point to tag it as a long-term goal.

While I do like the idea, I imagine it wouldn't really be noticeable on the standard turrets, as they show quite small in game (with the exception of the bigger ones in BTC).

With regard to spinning barrels, I wonder if that could be done with an animated sprite, like the muzzle flash, just re-positioned over the barrel itself...

The issue there would probably come about from meshing up 2D sprites and 3D models.  If you draw it on the turret the plane of the sprite will just bisect the turret; if you adjust the z-axis to get around that you run into other issues like it appearing odd and off-center if the camera isn't centered on your ship (like when you're aiming far left/right) in addition to having to position that sprite by hand for -every- single turret.

That said, I have been using sprites for other fun things.  For instance, on a lark, I decided to start working on the energy-based capital weapon for BTC; it has a prefire delay on it after you pull the trigger.  However, while it's in the 'prefire delay' I actually coded in firing some additional zero-damage, very short range projectiles with a spark graphic that start to fly out of the barrel at random angles in a cone, so for all the world it looks like the Yamato charging up from StarCraft BCs.   Just a nifty visual effect, but I dig things like that that make the game seem more alive with details.

[FlessenGreendart]

Fair enough, I just thought if you put it close enough on the z axis, it might look good.
I'm actually currently working on a Gatling gun/rotary cannon mesh at the moment, so this is actually quite interesting for me.

I like the sound of that charging animation! Can't wait to see it in action!