Engine Exhuast Effects

[Latisrof]

Does anybody have any pro tips for making engine exhaust effects work consistently? I'm implementing new pirate ship designs and for some ships, it's working but not for others which is really strange. The process is straightforward enough (editing the pictures with 1px blue lines) but the ship set still doesn't work. I think I may have something to do with the ship image picture but I'm unsure. Any information from experienced modders is welcome.

[Alvek]

Ask salemonz or Retreat1970 for help. This forum doesn't have a lot of active people left.

[salemonz]

Does anybody have any pro tips for making engine exhaust effects work consistently? I'm implementing new pirate ship designs and for some ships, it's working but not for others which is really strange. The process is straightforward enough (editing the pictures with 1px blue lines) but the ship set still doesn't work. I think I may have something to do with the ship image picture but I'm unsure. Any information from experienced modders is welcome.

I have found there are a few things that cause issues with engine effects.

1) Make sure your ship set image is around the size it should be (around 500 x 500px max...smaller is fine). In the past I would have images larger because they looked nice (1200 x 1200), but the game scales things down, which means it also scales down those 1px blue lines the game looks for to apply engine effects. A blue line that is too small won't give the game enough to grasp onto and apply the engine effect graphic. My too-large ship images would have these weird split/mini engine effects that looked terrible because the pure 1px blue line would get blended in with other colors as the game scaled down the image.

2) Make sure you're making the engine effect 1px blue lines at least 5px long. I have found that trying to create "tiny" engine thrusters (1px x 3px or 1px x 2px lines...like how Eve Online often has a dozen tiny thrust effects on their ships) just doesn't work. 1px x 5(or more)px blue lines for engines seems to work best.

3) Pray. Even after all that, I still have trouble with my ship sets sometimes. Make sure you don't have other "pure blue" colors in your ship set images.