[http://sourceforge.net/p/ufoai/feature-requests/501 Item 501] imported from sourceforge.net tracker on 2013-01-28 20:22:06

My plan & vision for the current trunk version of the ufo-animations was not completely fulfilled in this stage (dubbed ufo-animations v2.3 by me), because I am not satisfied with the implementation of the postprocessing bloom effect (glow) for the animations.
At the present time we have to define a seperate texture with the same name like the animation frame, but with _gm attached to make this animation glow. This is very nice if you have a full-size animation, where just parts of it should glow.
But in the case of the ufo-animations I made, this is not the best way ressourcewise, as many of the glowmaps would just be copies of the animation-frames themselves & would then have to be loaded into memory twice. That is why I did not use any glow for the ufo-animations yet.

I would need the whole set of the material-system's 'anim*' commands also as ganim* or glowanim* versions, where the glowmap is automatically defined as the animation-frame & the animation is a glowmapanimation & not a animation, where each frame has a glowmap apllied to it (like it is currently).

A good example for animations, where I could use this command nicely & which would improve many of those visually are all the button-animations or the screen-overlays or some of the fx...
But I do not want to have unnecessary renamed copies of files then also using twice as much textureslots & diskspace just to make animationglow possible.

Please, Arisian, if you have a minute left, it would be nice if you could checkout current trunk to see yourself what I mean (the buttons for example are in base/textures/pt/b) - Those should be the glowmaps themselves...
A good map to see many of the animations in action would be Tropic +bigufo Corrupter night version for example...

Thanks in advance for looking into it !
===== Comments Ported from Sourceforge =====

====== mcr2010 (2010-08-06 11:12:25) ======

By getting this feature I could upgrade all animations BIG TIME without having to change ANY artwork & it would look SO GREAT as first tests have shown (with dual [frame & frame_gm (==frame)] texture use...

& this should really be easy for you to implement, just the 'overwriting-base-texture-with-black-color-bug' has to be removed also for this to work...

Attached 2 screenies ;)
====== mcr2010 (2010-08-06 11:14:56) ======

glowanim_in_action
====== mcr2010 (2010-08-06 11:17:25) ======

2xglowanim_showing_overwritten_base_tex
====== tlh2000 (2010-08-07 04:58:36) ======

see r31273 (is this what you were requesting?)
====== tlh2000 (2010-08-07 04:58:53) ======

oh.. and please update the material section in the wiki with this
====== mcr2010 (2010-08-07 13:01:15) ======

Exactly that, but you made it even better :)
Great, this is even easier to use than to have all the anim-commands as glowversions :)))))

Unfortunately the 'alpha-channel-of-glowmap-overwrites-base-texture-with-black-color-bug' as I've dubbed this one ;) remains [see attached screenshot], so unfortunately I cannot use this feature yet :((((

Maybe you could take a look @ that also if you've time.

No problem, I will update the wiki with that info as well.