WW1 Italian Archie Burst - Red Colour

[Mike Dora 171]

Before Gterl produced his spectacular WW1 Italian terrain, I had "bodged" an ersatz WW1 Italian Front using Gepard's very fine Vogesen terrain, by relabeling locations, changing tile palettes, building textures, target types etc etc. It kind of worked, good enough for "private use".

 

One thing I did bring into it was something I found in a very old Cross & Cockade magazine article about the RFC/RAF in Italy, that Italian archie bursts had a distinctive red smoke, different from the black smoke of Austrian/German archie (and from the white smoke of British (& French?) archie on the Western Front). It took me a while of fiddling but eventually I managed a nice red tinge to the Italian archie bursts in my faked Italian terrain.

 

I'd like to reintroduce this effect to go with Gterl's proper WW1 Italian scenery. Trouble is, I've completely forgotten a) what effect file controls the smoke colour of AA bursts, and b) what palette numbers control the actual colours - what numbers indicate white, red, black etc.

 

Can anyone please remind me so I can go search and try to find my earlier work? duh..

 

Cheers

 

Mike

 

[+NeverEnough 78]

Mike, here's what I have in my FE Notes file:

 

Smoke Colors:

"British AA shells burst with white smoke, enemy with black, Italian with _red_." (emphasis added).

Now we already know about the first two colours, which are already incorporated in FE. However I would like to try to adjust the colour of Allied archie bursts in the Italian Front mod to "red" - after all there were many more Italian archie units there than British ones.

Looking at the various effects files, I see that colours are defined as four-parameter groups, eg:

ParticleColor[01].Value=0.300000,0.300000,0.300000,0.000000
AmbientColor=1.000000,1.000000,1.000000,1.000000
DiffuseColor=1.000000,1.000000,1.000000,1.000000

So my question to the effects experts is, what do these four values represent? Or put another way, what would people recommend to produce "red" archie smoke?

 

 

I played around with the exhaust emitters for the engines (because it was easy to see what was happening right away) and came up with this - it looks like the 4 numbers are for:

Red, Green, Blue, Transparency
It appears that the maximum value is 1.000000, although it doesn't crash if I go higher than one.

I don't know how much you know about color thoery for computers, so forgive me if I seem to be talking down to you.

Generally, for RedGreenBlue (RGB), if all three values are the same, you get a shade of gray. Higher numbers are lighter/brighter. Lower numbers are darker/duller. Red and green together makes yellow. All 1's would be white, all 0's would be black.

so 1.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000 would be bright red
1.000000, 0 .900000, 0.900000 would be pinkish
0.500000, 0.500000, 0.500000 would be medium gray

The last number is transparency, 1 means opaque, 0 means clear

The engine emitters have several particles, each with a slightly different color. For the explosions, try making one of them reddish, and leave the others grayish or yellowish. It will take some experimenting to get the right combination, but I'm sure that, with patience, you can get the effect you want.

[Wrench 9,849]

iirc, the colors used, or defined by these 4 sets are in a hexidecimal (sp?) value*.  One would need to find the RGB value (like in photoshop or other image program), then use a converter to get the hex values. 

I remember doing that for some lights (needed yellow, which at the time no aircraft had)

 

I know there's on-line converters for that. A google or bing search will turn them up

 

 

* all the 3W sims use these same type of numbers

[+Stephen1918 1,474]

A few years ago, several people were making new effects for FE. Stary posted some nice effects back in 2009 (under WWI and Early Years - Object Mods) I learned a lot about making effects by studying those.

Edited March 6, 2016 by Stephen1918