Effects Feedback Thread (Spells ,Waterfalls ,Falling leaves ect.)

First, I want to state a complement for the animation of ice nova. In most other games the animation is very fast and in the case of electricity you would expect this, but a slower nova for ice just looks more powerful and impressive. But I think it would be perfect if the animation would be a bit slower (maybe stretched about 0,2s longer?), that wouldn't make any real difference in the handling. Personally, I would remove some green from the colour of the nova.
Also the burning area of the fire trap looks quite impressive if outside of your light radius in dark instances.

I have two more suggestions to make the corresponding spells look a bit more powerful with just a minimum effort:

Fire Storm:
The projectiles should leave a fading reddish mild glow on the ground, to emphasize the heat of the projectiles. Optional this effect could stack (up to a limited intensity) if someone is spam-casting it on a single point.

Shock Nova:
After casting the nova, some tiny tiny sparks that sparkle shortly on the ground in the covered area of the nova would do quite well I think.

Hey

Im personally not much of a fan myself of frost nova because its so slow and doesn't work so well in different lighting environments. Im glad your happy with it though.

The reason fire storm and other spells dont leave things on the ground is because we dont have animated decals yet. I would love explosives spells to leave chard and burnt smoldering patches as an after math. We just cant do it yet.

However I can do what you asked with lightning nova ez pz.

Ill chuck some sparks in once im done with the current thing im on. Wont take long.

Poison arrow continues to be a massive framerate hit on very powerful cards, as does rain, ground fire/tar, and the fetid pool/bog effect.

Poison arrow is the worst, the others are just bad in a combination, but poison arrow does it all by itself.

"

Xendran wrote:

Poison arrow continues to be a massive framerate hit on very powerful cards, as does rain, ground fire/tar, and the fetid pool/bog effect.

Poison arrow is the worst, the others are just bad in a combination, but poison arrow does it all by itself.

Iv already answered this question many times. I cant do anything about it. I need our Lead programmer to add tech to fix this.

I just came here to congratulate you on the gate/portal/whatever Piety escapes through in the Chambers of Sin. Looks awesome.

Do you have any plans reworking or improving the current ground slam? It just looks plain stupid in an unsightly way. The orange glassy effect not only looks bad with alot of terrains it is also extremely annoying when repeatedly used ( as primary skill for example ). Why not use a bright light of some sort, that would atleast blend in far better in most terrains and wouldn't look so glassy. Even making it to a magma, exploding burn with realistic colours would be okay, but the current state it is in is just plain dreadful. Another solution would be to simply have a "dust" effect, that would actually work wonderfully. Imo dust effect instead of all the redundant stuff since it is such a spamable skill, far more appealing.

Bugs
I didn't read this whole thread so excuse me if this was already mentioned.
I have a suggestion about bugs (insect). In forest areas they really add a lot considering how small and probably easy thing to add it is. Definitely do not get rid of them but improve them. The worst thing about them are their trails currently. Some of them use straight trails, they appear and vanish. It doesn't look right. In real forest you don't see this (or in park, or your kitchen). It would be ok if they were flying across your screen but they are not, they are just running on the ground. Quite too quickly as well. I'm talking about those black and red bugs. I would add a screenie but it crashes the client, yep, my pc can't even handle a screenshot now, hehe (fixed). The swarms of flies are perfect already.

Now the actual suggestions:

- Make a lot more of the walking insects use curved (and complicated, if possible) trails. Even if it was just an 8, those bugs who use such trail look a lot more realistic.

- Make the bugs which run on the ground straight ahead a bit slower.

- Make the walking bugs vanish faster. It looks a bit weird when they start vanishing. I know it has to be this way, they can't really walk under some stone and such, but even in real life it is usually that you see a bug, blink, and then the bug is gone (behind some leaf, stone, something).

- Make the walking insects stop for a while and then run again. Many kinds of walking insects do this. There is no need to incorporate acceleration etc., it appears to human eyes as if they reached maximal speed instantly, same with stopping. This is the most important thing when imitating insect imo. It's just an illusion but human eye gets used to the pattern, simple irregular breaks do wonders.


- Make some of the insects fly across the screen at random altitude. Those can be fast!

- Edit idea: Don't let the flying insects slow down. They don't do that and it looks silly. They simply land on something or keep flying (or stop in the air). Accelerating is cool, though, it is exactly what you should use a lot: accelerating bug vanishing at high speed, that's what bugs do when you startle them (they fly away). I'm not sure about this anymore. Starting the flight could be fine but actual speeding up would probably look just as bad as slowing down.

They look quite bad when you zoom in but I think it is not really important, their appearance is fine when zoomed out. Their movement however is something you notice even when running across a map.

Pictures:

These black bugs appear and vanish too slowly. Are those ants? To imitate ants it would be better to make a complex line of them, not vanishing at all, just going on and on.

Red bugs with straight trails

Swarm

There are other kinds that look a bit silly but it is really minor, sometimes they don't head the right way and the acceleration doesn't look right if they slow down when turning. Also I am not sure if they are actually "flying":

ladybug?

+
After playing mud geyser map (fetid pool environment) I must admit the atmosphere there is a lot stronger, partially because of the flying insect. The worms on the ground are a bit plain and they could be improved in a similar way as the walking forest insect but the flies are awesome.

I've just noticed that some skill effects don't take in account the altitude..they remain on the character's plane but they hit enemies below him..
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2k77dkqfnvbxzbk/screenshot-0000.png
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6g4kp7lmv8sljw4/screenshot-0001.png

Moreover the skill effect go through the obstacles and even on empty spaces..

again my suggestion
-more weather effects possible some more areas with rain
-that sometimes a sandstom can happen in the desert areas
-some flys over dead corpses
-moving cockroaches on the floors and bugs like in the post before
-that you can find sometimes some windroses blowing over the battlefield just an idea for some dangerous things could be added to the battlefield that you cant kill and have to be care of not to step in