before...
...after
Do you notice anything? Yes, the destroyer is unharmed, but shee is putting up a smoke screen anyway, and the smoke is coming out from her funnels
What I have done:
- created a dummy gun, firing dummy shells (took the idea from TDW and sergbuto
);
- added two new armament bones on top of the chimneys of the ship used for this test;
- assigned the dummy gun to the two new gun linking bones through eqp file;
- copied the smoke fx used by sober for its smoke screen and pasted it in a new dat file;
- touched up a bit its particle generators (still far by perfect);
- assigned the new smoke particles as muzzle flash effect of the dummy gun. That simple
Advantages of this method:
- we don't need to give up any existing effect for getting smoke screen in game;
- we can create as many different smoke screen types as we want, and assign them to our ships as we do with sensors and armaments;
- we can decide which ships will lay smoke screens and which not;
- we can set where on the ships the smoke will pour out (funnels, stacks on the deck, etc.);
- ships don't need to be on fire for laying smoke screens: as long as they can fire their dummy guns against any enemy targets, they will start "smoking". When their enemies will disappear, they will stop emanating the smoke with a configurable delay;
- ship's usage of smoke screen can be configured to some extent, by playing around with gun controller parameters
(by now, I and Volodya have become quite familiar with them 
).