Ideally the flag would be in the weapons table in the particle spew tab

I gave the code a quick look and this should only take about 10-15 minutes to get working and tested with only a few changes. I've got a little birthday thing to do today and then I'm going to start adding all of my code from the recent test builds to CVS. After that I'll get to work on this.

EDIT: Done! It's not in CVS yet though. I edited Maxim_Particle that I was using to test the EFFs and made the black transparent on a few frames. Worked ok but I noticed that only one frame (the first) was ever shown. Looking at the code that tells it what frame to render it was using the wrong logic. It was only calculating the frame if the number of frames was less than 1 rather than greater. Going through CVS it looks like it's always been that way. Also had to change the math to pick frames since that was freaky but it's pretty random in the frames it plays now.

If you used it as a laser bitmap you are indeed correct: It only showed the first frame (which is a bug, and I reported it several times).

If you used it as a particle in particle spew, it should render the full animation - always worked without problems.

If you used it as a laser bitmap you are indeed correct: It only showed the first frame (which is a bug, and I reported it several times).

Looking at the code I don't see a problem here. Looks like it should use all of the frames just fine. I'll try and find out what's going wrong here.

If you used it as a particle in particle spew, it should render the full animation - always worked without problems.

Yep, this is what I was referring to. The code should have never worked since the day it was added actually. There was a bug in bm_load_animation() that caused it to not send back the frames and fps if the animation was already loaded so would come up with 0. But even then it probably should have crashed or used the wrong graphics rather than working.

Oddly enough, Particle spew animations worked just fine (and plenty use has been made of it)

It was laser bitmaps which (when filled in by an animation) only rendered the first frame, and had really odd behaviour (especially concerning size).

Oddly enough, Particle spew animations worked just fine (and plenty use has been made of it)

Yep I should have been paying more attention. The code that sets the frame for the particle in weapons.cpp never should have been there in the first place since it's set in particle.cpp. The fact that the code was wrong only kept it from hitting an Assert(). It just needs to be taken out so no one else makes the same mistake I did.

It was laser bitmaps which (when filled in by an animation) only rendered the first frame, and had really odd behaviour (especially concerning size).

Can you describe a little more what I should be looking for? Just putting a printf() in the code shows that it's using different frames like it should, using Circe_Bitmap.ani as a test.

It somehow doesn't display them in-game though. All I get is a pretty much tiny (setting the size didn't appear to help much) blob displaying the first frame of the ANI.

If an ANI is used for a beam texture, the game crashes to desktop.

Side note: Think you could compile a quick build with the solid particle rendering feature? I'm working on something, and it would be cool to test it "live"

It somehow doesn't display them in-game though. All I get is a pretty much tiny (setting the size didn't appear to help much) blob displaying the first frame of the ANI.

Alright, I'll look at this tonight and see if I can't make a change that you can test.

If an ANI is used for a beam texture, the game crashes to desktop.

Umm, I think there is still a mantis bug assigned to me about this. I'll work on that too now that pretty much all of my in-testing code has gone into CVS.

Side note: Think you could compile a quick build with the solid particle rendering feature? I'm working on something, and it would be cool to test it "live"

No problem. I'll see if I can do something with the above two issues tonight and then post something early tomorrow. Just check http://icculus.org/~taylor/fso/testing for anything with an "LSD" on it and that will be the build. It may be there in the next 3-4 hours if your around to check for it then.

EDIT: Should be there now (20041102_LSD-win32.zip). The render opaque flag is just how you listed earlier. I didn't test it much so if it doesn't work as you were expecting let me know. Beam sections should use anis now but I don't know how well. It may need some tweaking so if you see problems let me know, and send a good graphic to test with since what I was using looked like crap anyway. Still playing with the animated laser bitmaps so nothing new there other than a bug fix for chosing a texture frame too high.

You. Are my hero.

*Goes off to test*

Okay, done some testing

1) Parts of it work!

but

2) While the effect renders over the background correctly, it does not render over other effects properly. Anything behind one of the OpaqueRendered particles will be invisible (i.e. transparent) - Alpha transparency does not work as it should. The effects do not blend over other effects (or other OpaqueRendered effects). They also "vanish" from some angles, but this might have to do with the rendering problem.

3) I've created an 28-Frame .eff file (TGA with alpha transparency) for my testing, but it only renders the FIRST frame, as if it were a bitmap, not an animation. The naming is correct (xx_0000 to xx_0027), and the $Frame: entry is set to "28". The animation has been used as a Particle spew bitmap (animation).

2) While the effect renders over the background correctly, it does not render over other effects properly. Anything behind one of the OpaqueRendered particles will be invisible (i.e. transparent) - Alpha transparency does not work as it should. The effects do not blend over other effects (or other OpaqueRendered effects). They also "vanish" from some angles, but this might have to do with the rendering problem.

"other effects" being other weapon effects or ship stuff as well? I'll play with this some but if you have a particular case that doesn't work that I could test against that would be helpful. I'm not asking for any images just a simple "with this type of bitmap, glow of this type, alpha tga particles (.eff), fired at this particular thing, gives this wrong effect" kind of thing. That would be a lot faster than me flying around in the game shooting at crap, looking for a problem. If that worked I would have noticed it the first time

3) I've created an 28-Frame .eff file (TGA with alpha transparency) for my testing, but it only renders the FIRST frame, as if it were a bitmap, not an animation. The naming is correct (xx_0000 to xx_0027), and the $Frame: entry is set to "28". The animation has been used as a Particle spew bitmap (animation).

If you convert it to an ani does it show the other frames? I don't think anything changed that would have caused this to not work but I'll test it just in case. If you want I'll have a little bit of debug info about what frame of what animation it trying to play get printed out on the HUD in the next build. Don't know if you would get much benefit from that but the offer is there.

"other effects" being other weapon effects or ship stuff as well? I'll play with this some but if you have a particular case that doesn't work that I could test against that would be helpful. I'm not asking for any images just a simple "with this type of bitmap, glow of this type, alpha tga particles (.eff), fired at this particular thing, gives this wrong effect" kind of thing. That would be a lot faster than me flying around in the game shooting at crap, looking for a problem. If that worked I would have noticed it the first time

Anything. Explosions, other particles, missile trails. I can get you a few screenies if you need

If you convert it to an ani does it show the other frames? I don't think anything changed that would have caused this to not work but I'll test it just in case. If you want I'll have a little bit of debug info about what frame of what animation it trying to play get printed out on the HUD in the next build. Don't know if you would get much benefit from that but the offer is there.

Well, ANI particles worked fine (always did) - this is basically the same, just in .eff form and with "RenderOpaque" on YES. Converting to an ANI might be problematic since it uses alpha transparency. The debug thingy could help, and anything that *could* help is generally a good thing, isn't it?

Anything. Explosions, other particles, missile trails. I can get you a few screenies if you need

Uh, screenies, yeah I was going to say that. No really, I was

Post if you want to just send them to taylor at icculus dot org.

Well, ANI particles worked fine (always did) - this is basically the same, just in .eff form and with "RenderOpaque" on YES. Converting to an ANI might be problematic since it uses alpha transparency. The debug thingy could help, and anything that *could* help is generally a good thing, isn't it?

I was just curious to know if the playing part was messed up, not to really use an ani permanently. It would be enough to substitute (probably shouldn't have used "convert") any ani for the particle spew just to make sure the basic code isn't broken. I'll add that debug info in so that you can make sure the eff is working right. It may get annoying but I think it will help.

Ok got the first image only thing fixed. I had just missed getting it from the code that I normally use to a stable code tree that everyone else gets to use.

Playing around with the effects I did see one or two very quick instances of something not showing up behind the particles but it doesn't always happen for me. Explosions and other particle types showed up fine but I do think missile trails go missing. There were a couple of things that caught my eye quickly but I wasn't able to figure out what was actually missing.

See here:

http://www.penguinbomb.com/lightspeed/SCP/BugsRO.jpg

If I use a conventional ANI, things seem to render more or less correctly (though you don't see much of course since it's rendered opaque as it should.)

I can send you my test files if you want.

I can send you my test files if you want.

Yeah, that may help. I'm deffinitely not seeing everything in that picture during my tests. I've only been testing with primaries though so there may be a difference there.