OK I guess a lot of people might have heard of this already, but apart from general positive comments on my BIS thread I never really submitted it for a proper beta review. I work on it now & then so progress is generally slow, however it is in a state that can provide very interesting SP gameplay.
Description:
Provides destroyed vehicles with very large and realistic smoke effects (within the bounds of ArmA's particle system). Each vehicle will generate a smoke source, and each time some random parameters decide on the particular look of each smoke instance. It does not replace default smoke, rather it is an effect applied over default smoke. However the addon also tweaks default smoke to be more sympathetic to the addon. Building collapse effects are also substantially tweaked to give a much larger & longer lasting dust effect.
The main smoke effects themselves last for an average of three-quarters of an hour, long enough to give the battlefield some sense of history, especially as the smoke effects go through several phases of transaction, eventually smoldering down to almost nothing before petering out. Helicopters, aircraft and fuel trucks have a rather different look, I applied an animated dense black oily smoke to these vehicles.
As well as smoke, the current version (4.3a) adds new frag grenade effects and also gives smoke grenades actual AI viewblock abilities, allowing for a genuine reason to use them ingame.
Caveats:
Right now I would describe the addon as SP eye-candy, as it only adds smoke effects to local killed events on vehicles. However the config tweaks to the default effects are MP friendly. Also the smoke grenade viewblock functionality suffers from an ArmA bug. In ArmA currently, the "throw" action is not correctly captured as a global "fired" event, meaning that clients who throw smoke grenades will not successfully spawn a viewblock object. However, if a client
fires a smokeshell from a grenadier weapon then it will have full MP viewblock functionality.
The ArmA particle scaling bug means that the effects look great at medium and long distance, but getting close will reveal the bug as the particles refuse to scale properly, and the particles will seem to "shrink". Nothing I can do about that I'm afraid.
There is an added "Wind info" action which will NOT be in the next version, it basically allows you to know the wind speed & direction. The indicated direction is the direction the wind is blowing TO.
Further details:
The smoke grenade viewblock can be most easily described by this simple illustration:
and the viewblock "capsule" will follow the wind direction also over it's lifetime, as I've noticed that wind direction & speed can change quite a bit even over a minute. I've found it to be very effective as a tactical aid.
The download can be gotten here:
http://dmarkwick64.googlepages.com/DMSmokeEffectsBeta4_3a.rarPlease note that Extended Event Handlers are required. This has become somewhat of a ubiquitous requirement for a lot of addons by now.
There is a "b" version, it's a total smoke viewblock addon (i.e. ALL smoke generates viewblocks) and is very heavy on the framerate, so I do not include it for the purposes of this beta review. The next version will also have the smoke grenade viewbock portion as a separate addon as I think it's important enough to warrant this.
I hope you enjoy it
some screenies: