Making them beams clearer

Well, I know how, I just don't know...how.

I was thinking we should add one of the big vertical beams in the game to it. There are xEmitters handy, xEffects.Ion*. There's also an Emitter, Onslaught.ONSNodeBeamBlueEffect, that would work. But alas I know nothing about the particle systems, and it's Sunday night...and back to work.

That, and the Ion Cannon beams seem to have some odd directions hardcoded into them. And I don't know how to change it yet.

My vision would be to make the Healing Blast look like a blue Ion Cannon like so: A wide vertical beam of light appears and begins to shrink. When it gets to pencil size, an Ion Cannon-like fire goes off that does the healing blast itself.

Are people having difficulty seeing the spheres? All of them seem quite clear to me.

Shantara wrote:

Are people having difficulty seeing the spheres? All of them seem quite clear to me.

Spheres, no. But the new "blast" artifacts effects aren't as pronounced.

Er, sorry I meant blasts. It seemed fairly obvious to me when they hit.

My question was seeing the little marker that is spawned before they go off. Once they are actually exploding, they're visible.

Moof wrote:

My question was seeing the little marker that is spawned before they go off. Once they are actually exploding, they're visible.

The marker usually seems to be underground most of the time. Perhaps we could have an unseen collision detector a little ahead of the actual spawn?

Hey, that might work. You know how we could do it? Yank the code for lucky weapons. Spawn the blast chargers in front of the player in the same spot lucky items do.

At the moment, when you spawn an explosion, it does a trace straight ahead from the crosshairs on the hud. It has a maximum range. If it hits something before it gets to that maximum range, the explosion will spawn there. Otherwise it is at the maximum range.
The first thing that happens is a charger spawns. This is a small star, in the colour of the blast so you can identify what type it is. After about 2 seconds, the explosion goes off at that spot.

If we are having trouble seeing the "charger stars", we could make them bigger, or brighter. I think the healing one in particular may be a bit dull.

We could have a vertical beam going up as Moof suggest, but that won't particularly help if the explosion is spawned on the ceiling.