Oh yes! I am the law!I managed to reduce the smoke systems on X-Bomber (of which there were many - grey for dust, blue-glowing for hyper-jumps, green for radiation, and white -> yellow -> orange -> red-glowing for napalm), which was a system comprising probably over a dozen objects and controlled from loads of different, random places in the game into a single, centralised system in the level engine using 2 objects; a generator and an actual cloud sprite.The beauty is that it can be programmed to handle lots of different effects in future if the need arises and it can be overridden by individual missions if you want a one-off effect not-included in the engine.It can also generate different sprites that way if the standard cloud sprite object doesn't meet the requirement (although it too can be programmed with more animations in future).I reworked the green radiation clouds from the Alliance Astrofighter bombs in Mission 06 to use this system and it performs great, despite the number of objects that effect uses.The only thing it struggled on was the Mission 10's Fire-Monster boss, which just needs too many effect objects for the intelligent detection routine to process.So I used the override method above to generate a special object that was simplified so that the MMF2 run-time engine didn't have to think so hard about managing loads of them.I finished rolling all the Alliance Astrofighter variants into a single, portable object too. There are four main types of basic Astrofighter:[ Standard | Fast/Atmospheric variant | Carter's "Attacker" variant | and the show's 'Plunger' variant ]That doesn't include different colour and weapon subtypes of the above (of which there are many), which are also rolled in.There are loads of other Astrofighters too but they involve multiple animations each or separate into 2 ships etc. Those are too complicated or just dissimilar to make integrating them into fewer objects worthwhile.So where are your pictures? Well, I didn't get any good screenshots but here's the new fire-monster just after it fired a load of its guided fire-trail missile things at me. So I decided to stick it with the last of my X-Impulse:
http://www.xbomber.co.uk/iv/#/content/m10r-4.jpgand this is just testing the actual napalm part of the system in Mission 01. If you zoom in, you can see the MMF2 code window with X-Bomber in a window infront.
http://www.xbomber.co.uk/iv/#/content/xb-dev6.jpg
Dream big and bold and daring.