What about this?pd wrote: WEAPONS
Weapon effects are on my list of "mock-ups to-do"... Since we don't show actual ship parts externally, I don't think we need to have weapon effects come out of certain parts. Instead they can originate from the center of the ship, but only be shown starting at the boundary volume.
Personally I am not too concerned whether or not a beam originates exactly from the point to which the player has placed his/her weapon (although it would of course be nice if it would) as battles will probably usually have numerous different ships shooting numerous different beam weapons. So the exact place where a single beam originates from might not usually be the first thing on the player`s mind. However having the beams originate from the model itself would be nice, at least compared to this first mock-up where the beams seem to originate from the ships shields, which seems a bit weird.pd wrote:What will be possible is to have relativly small 'gun emission points', which could be placed pretty much freely on the surface of the meshes. So that if the player decides to put a laser weapon somewhere on the left side of the ship, it will actually fire from there. Those should be relativly small and simple, so that they're not much of an effort to create and fit to the racial designs. Maybe we could even use colors to indicate whether there is a laser or ballistic weapon underneath.
This way the weapons don't interfere with the designs itself, and still there is an indication of the weapons used.
Also, since there have been much discussion in this topic about changing ship models at least as far as colours are concerned, should a possible model change like battle damage also be considered? (This might of course be a quite low priority issue and as such not very important currently.)