DMarkwick

Thanks :) That particular smoke mod seems to be a simple texture/gradient replacement, with some file that I do not recognise and that makes little sense in Notepad++. I'll be replacing textures for sure, but I also want to get into the mechanics of the particles' behavior, how long they last, how solid thay are, how dense they are, which texture they use, how they move etc, and how all these can be affected across their lifetime. (If they can be.) Looking at the Black Shark Bazar/effects folder, there are a lot of shader text files in there, so I'll need to know more about them, their properties & what they mean, and syntax etc.

The only time I found TrackIR laggyness is when I accidentally disabled it ingame (F9), when I re-enabled it it lagged horribly. I needed to switch both the sim and TIR down and restart both to lose the lag.

Hi, I'd like to make a smoke mod for Black Shark, similar to the smoke mod I made for Armed Assault. Link: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=68101 Where can I look to find out modding info for Black Shark? I know nothing at all about modding this particular product so I need info suitable for a standing start. In particular I need info on config settings, default effects, scripting, environmental effects and resource formats. My first interest will be in making the vehicle wreck smoke effects better. Kindest regards DMarkwick

Well, OK, I realise this is my first day here etc (having received and installed BS just yesterday) but in the spirit of conversation & the topic in hand, I'll reply :) I guess the point I was making is that, if we take Armed Assault as an example (and I accept the different engine specs etc) then the visual impact of viewblock is minimal. There is no new rendering going on, the visual geometry is exactly the same. Only the AI view is affected. As for collision, I guess for the purposes of BS only the helo itself needs to have collision logic, all the AI can continue to behave exactly as they do right now, i.e. no logic given over to collision avoidance with trees at all. I think that's perfectly acceptable. I guess an appropriate speed reduction to fake the effects of avoidance can be implemented, with exceptions given to vehicles on road surfaces.

If I can pitch in my own opinion: I'd like viewblockable & masking trees. Armed Assault has a similar number/density of trees and there's nice tree viewblock activity in there, with little impact on framerate. In fact, one third-party addon for Armed Assault involves ramping up the viewblock elements of each tree, increasing the elements per tree by a factor of 5 or 10. Surprisingly, I did not see any framerate hit by using it, I guess not being rendered geometry helped out there. Black Shark would not need anything like the same number of elements per tree to get similar activity.

I'd like to make a small smoke mod for Black Shark (I do the JTD SmokeEffects for Armed Assault :)) but I have no idea about the modding structure of Black Shark. I only received & installed the thing yesterday so you'll forgive me :) The thing I'd like to address most is the vehicle wreck smoke effects, I think they're a little underwhelming :) and I'd like to add some better, bigger smoke effects. Does anyone know of a resource I can read to find out how to start?