Kinetic VFX

1.2.1

1.2.1
New
- Smoke screens: a smoke grenade builds a real screen that rolls low with the wind, hangs about a minute longer in calm air, streams off in a breeze and tears in strong wind; blasts and helicopter downwash thin it. Any mod's smoke grenade works.
- Bullet holes stay: rounds striking walls, rocks, fences and trees leave their hole for about 5 minutes (the game's fade within a minute or so), capped by the Performance level.
- Collapse dust: a collapsing building rolls out a low dust cloud, a column rises over the ruin, a haze hangs over it for minutes and the rubble smokes.
- Indoor dust: a long firefight inside a house fills the room with a faint dust haze that settles out over a minute or two, and shakes grit off the ceiling.
Fixed
- Smoke over fires no longer shows hard shadows of trees, fences and huts printed on it at night.
- Wind direction: grass fires now spread downwind (before, they spread into the wind), flames and fire light lean with the wind, and a blast's gust bends grass and trees away from the blast.
- Tracers: the white-hot core sits at the tip of the streak, and the game's log no longer fills with warnings about them.
- Fire shadows have a limit: at most 3 to 16 fires cast shadows at once (Low to I Want It All); a burning convoy no longer costs frame rate for each one.
- Flares are as they were before 1.2.0's light changes.
Your settings file is kept; the four new sliders (smokeScreen, bulletScars, collapseDust, indoorDust) are added at 100 %.

1.2.0

1.2.0
New
- Damaged engines smoke: a hurt engine gives off grey smoke, a wrecked one black smoke with dark exhaust while it still runs, trailing behind a moving vehicle; cars and trucks steam from the radiator; a repair stops it.
- Fragment spray: a blast's fragments kick up dirt, chips and sparks all round it, out to about 18 m for a hand grenade and 26 m for a mortar shell (sized by the charge). Halved when Shrapnel is loaded.
- Rocket smoke: a launcher's propellant cloud hangs at the shooter's spot and drifts off, and the rocket's smoke trail stays along its path for several seconds.
- Lamps flicker when a blast wave reaches them, some brown out for a few seconds (with Congos Dynamic Lights loaded; the setting can turn it on for any lamp).
- Your own muzzle flash at night is held back (ownFlash) so you can see what you're shooting at; everyone else's a notch smaller.
- Others' flashlights no longer float as a bright point at long range: the lens glare fades with distance.
- Grass fires: grenades, tracer rounds and flares can start one now; a fire spreads as a widening front with leaning flames and leaves burnt ground for 20 minutes with ash smoke and, at night, glowing embers.
- More variation everywhere (lights, pulses, sizes), and smoke and dust under a roof take no wind.
- Real light: every light the mod makes now casts shadows (muzzle flashes, blasts, tracers, sparks near you; fires anywhere). New settings: lightShadows and fireLight.
- Light based on real physics: fires breathe at their flames' natural pulse rate instead of flickering, their shadows shift softly with the flames and lean with the wind; muzzle flashes drop away within a few frames; blasts swell, fade and cool from yellow-white to deep orange, bigger and longer for bigger charges.
- Burning vehicles no longer light a hard bright circle on the ground: a wide, soft fire light with real shadows replaces it.
- Blasts follow real blast physics: the shock front races out faster than sound and slows as it weakens, scaled by each charge's explosive weight; you see it as a brief band of bent air by day.
- The blast wind throws dust out along the ground at its real speed, coloured by the ground in each direction, and the dust drifts back as the air rushes in behind the front.
- The pressure wave, the gust in the grass and trees, dust shaken off houses and flickering lamps all arrive when the shock front does, as strong as the blast's overpressure where you are.
Changed
- The fuel pool fire remade and put on the ground: it used to float at the tanker's tank height; now a carpet of flames burns on the ground round the wreck, with big flames standing in it, tall licks, embers and thicker black smoke.
- Each new effect has its own slider and follows the Performance levels.

1.1.2

New
- Performance setting: Potato, Low, Medium, High (as before, the default) and I Want It All. Lower levels trim the most costly effects first (battle haze, lights, tracer glow at long range, grass fires, impacts and blast wind at a distance). In a busy test scene Potato saved about 80 % of Kinetic VFX's cost and Low/Medium about 55 %. I Want It All adds the blast gust, longer-lasting wrecks and craters and draws effects further out.
- Explosion effects scale with the explosive's real charge, read from the game's own data, so other mods' grenades, rockets, shells, bombs and mines get effects sized to match.
Fixed
- The smoke a mortar or shell leaves no longer hangs as a ball in calm air: it rises, spreads and thins out.

1.1.1

1.1.1
Fixed
- A machine gun's hot-barrel smoke no longer hangs in the air when the gunner reloads or turns: it follows the muzzle.
- A rocket or shell that hits a vehicle or a soldier no longer leaves smouldering crater smoke on them (it kept rising from thin air once the vehicle moved).

1.1.0

1.1.0
New
- Tracers: a burning, flickering glow on every tracer's head with a white-hot core, visible far off, a brighter head by day, and a short glow with a wisp of smoke where a tracer strikes before it has burnt out. The tracer light reaches further. Works with any mod's tracer rounds; Spectral Tracers isn't needed.
- Bullet impacts by surface: dirt and clods, stone chips and powder, brick dust, wood splinters, with dust drifting off in the wind.
- A blast's burst: dark smoke thrown out, a spray of sparks and a bigger fireball.
- Muzzle gas: each shot's side smoke jets out with the gas; at night now and then a few grains of burning powder.
- Look setting: Realistic (as tuned) or Cinematic (bigger, thicker, longer-lasting, brighter; still no lens or screen effects).
- Smoke and dust take light properly (lit from below by fires and flashes instead of glowing discs); grass fire smoke as a continuous plume.
- Cook-off pops can be heard.
- With ReFX - Effects Enhancement or Spectral Tracers loaded, Kinetic VFX switches off its own version of their effects, so nothing doubles up. Your settings stay as they are.
Fixed
- The machine-gun barrel glow lies along the barrel (and is never drawn on your own gun in first person).
- Sparks no longer spray off the shooter's own gun.
- No big blob of light in front of your sights when a tracer leaves the barrel (first person, aiming down the sights).
Your settings file is kept; the new settings are added with their defaults.

1.0.0