Fade over distance bullet effect

[unknown1]

Hi all . New to mdding.

I would like some advice and directions on modifying the laser bullets glow intensity in relation to distance travelled.

In the x3 series of games, right at the end of the bullet lifetime, it experiences a sudden drop in glow until it dies all togheter.
In X3 Reunion XTM mod, the guys managed to modify all big bullets like PPCs to have a really low glow effect ever since the bullets starts it's life, in order to maintain performance.
Since that mod is long dead i was wondering if anyone knows in general, for X3TC , albion prelude, etc what file/files and what tools are needed to modify the bullets fade effect.

The reason I am asking is because i want to revert the changes made in X3 Reunion XTM since it's my favourite game but i can't see the bullets in battles.

[Hairless-Ape]

Likely you need to use X3 Editor 2 tool open up addon/10.cat and modify the TBullets.pck file.
In there, you'll find 33 settings for each weapon that can be adjusted. One of these settings is called "Trail effect" and I see another called "Engine trail". I'm sure you can play with these for a given weapon and see if it does the trick for you. As far as I'm aware, there is no other place where a weapon effect can be altered.

Note, using X3 Editor 2, you can either save back the whole modified 10.cat file (which will be overwritten by mod updates), or you can specifically save your altered TBullets.pck file (or even TBullets.txt if you like) to the addon/types folder, where if it exists there, it will override the default data in the 10.cat file.

[unknown1]

Thanks a lot mate. I will try and do as you said. Cheers.

EDIT:

I just tried different values in those fields, the effects change indeed. But the invisible bullets thing persists.

When i'm in an empty sector, the bullets are fine, they are visible for their entire lifetime.

As long as i spawn a single K and start fighting, the bullet fade behavior kicks in. They are only visible only when they are about to hit my ship, aka only when they come very close to the camera.

It's something else, I remember back in the day, the modders said they implemented it to combat lag in large battles.
Problem is, I have no problem with lag even in large battles with today's hardware, yet it keeps happening.
I checked all the files in the mod, can't figure how they frikking did it.

It only affects the PPCs, Terran BETA EMPCs,and Paranid Heavy Missile Gun(where both bullet and the missile-like trail dissapear)

[Hairless-Ape]

the modders said they implemented it to combat lag in large battles.

I assume they are referring to "In System" fleet battles where you are present in that very system.
The only thing that would affect 'lag' in a large fleet battle, that had to do with bullets/missiles would be a tradeoff they can make between Fire Rate and output damage. If you severely restrict the Fire Rate, but increase the Weapons damage, you'll get the same overall effective damage being done over time (DPS), but with far less bullets/missiles actually sitting in space requiring CPU time to service them. It's likely this is what they did in the past, and you could reverse it. I agree, most modern PC's don't really suffer from being CPU bound like the old one's and so this isn't really necessary anymore.

So to reverse what they did, you could try lowering the weapons Damage but increasing the Fire Rate:

The bullet/missile Damage can be adjusted in TBullets.pck. These are "Hull damage" and "Shield damage".

Fire Rate is a bit trickier and I'm not entirely positive how to effectively raise it, but I would try increasing "Speed" of the bullet while decreasing its "Lifetime". This would effectively reduce the time a bullet spent in space while keeping the same effective range. The problem is that I don't know the mechanism that is used to determine the interval the program uses between shots. Hector0x or Joubarbe may know.

[unknown1]

Thanks for the reply.
I know all the parameters you described.

They have nothing to do with the thing i'm experiencing.
The bullets are visible only a fraction of their lifetime, when very near to the player/camera. 95% of the bullets lifetime they are invisible.
Even if i reduce the fire rate to 1 bullet every 10 seconds or even 1 minute, the same phenomenom applies.

I will record a short video and show you

[Hairless-Ape]

Honestly, what you are describing sounds more like the "View Distance" setting in your startup screen. Make sure it's on "very high".

This is the only setting in the game that would affect your ability to view objects based on their distance from the camera. Lowering this would indeed help the game's frame-rate or perceived lag, so maybe it's just this simple?

[unknown1]

It's not the view distance, Reunion does not have such an option.
The second strange thing that makes me strongly believe it's a thing the modders put in place for performance back in the day is that it only affects capital weapons. Vanilla Reunion does not have such an option, all PPC is clearly visible even several kilometers away.


I uploaded 2 videos where you can see this behaviour.

https://youtu.be/gcn8nOLfCJo
https://youtu.be/bsvj5H52e-o

In the first clip, look towards the front of my ships, the nose....you can see the bullets are only visible when I zoom in...also you will see towards the end of the clip that the enemy fire is completely invisible unless I zoom in .
In the second clip I have Heavy missile Guns and as long as there is no other ship in the sector , the bullets and trail is visible.As soon as I start fighting, both the trail and bullets are invisible unless I zoom in



EDIT:
I solved the issue by installing a very hard to find mod after nearly 20 years: "Combat Mod" by '' ulfius ''
It basically changed all aspects of the bullets and lasers, from colours, sound, speed rate of fire etc. Fortunately, he got rid of the fade effect and at the same time fixed the performance issue in a smart way, by lowering rate of fire/increasing damage and reducing overall bullet clutter