Combat Weapon effects.

I am trying to figure out how to change this. The two weapons that annoy me the most are the Graviton driver (the space amoeba look doesn't help either) and photon torpedoes. They move so slowly that battles are decided before half the weapons hit.

Here's what i've discovered so far

\GalCiv2\Data\English\GC2Types.xml seems to be the file to modify, but the data for the weapons is not consistant.

Example code: I had to change < to [ so the forum wouldn't try to format it
[Weapon]
[Name]PhotonTorpedo1[/Name]
[DisplayName]Photon Torpedo II[/DisplayName]
...
[FrameCount]60[/FrameCount]
[LaunchFrame]8[/LaunchFrame]
[ImpactFrame]60[/ImpactFrame]
...
[ImpactFrame]60[/ImpactFrame]
[/Weapon]

From what i've read in Carielf's modding guide, the Launch frame and impact frame are the animation frames the graphic should be at during those two events. The frame count is not explained.

All beam weapons, except Doom Ray, do not use these tags. The only reason I can come up with is that the Doom Ray is special since it has a graphic which changes over time. The rest of the beams are pretty simple. Guns and missiles do use these, but again not all. Nor are the tags all used in some weapons, which makes it more confusing. For instance, Photon Torpedo I uses a frame count of 60 and a launch frame of 8, yet does not specify an impact frame. Photon Torps II and III do however specify a frame count of 60, in two locations.

My initial try was to mirror the values of the Photonic Torpedo, which moves at a much better pace. I built a simple mod using that one file, and tried to run with it. I had a ship with both photon and photonic torps, and they behaved exactly as before - the photonic hit before the photon was halfway there. I used an existing v1.2 game with no previous mods that had the proper techs, which may have skewed things. Maybe running a new game using the modded file will work.

if that fails, the only other idea I can come up with is that graphical speed is modified in the \GalCiv2\Gfx\Weapons folder, and those files are pretty scary to look at, let alone mod.

This is an extremely old thread and I have no idea if anyone is really coming here anymore, but has anyone ever solved this puzzle?  One of the things that I notice is that many of the weapons don't seem to sync well with the location of the ship, e.g., a beam weapon will fire and then it will continue to originate from the original space the ship occupied after the ship had already left the space.  In other words the beam emanates from empty space.  Also, many times the beams will appear to impact on empty space but damae is recorded on the enemy ship and there are hull explosions.  Is there a way to fix this?  Some of the weapons graphics are worse than others.  On a final note, in the Ship Component's Editor, what is the purpose of the  "Animation Frame" inputs, i.e., Launch, Impact and Count?  Any input would be appreciated.

I'm going to guess that it has something to do with syncing the weapon audio with the animation, other than that no idea, sorry.

Want to bump this.  I now notice that many of the beam weapon effects (including the standard ones used by the vanilla game) are not really synced very well to the position of the starship firing or being hit by them.  The effect is that beam weapons will emanate from the previous position of the starship and will strike areas before the target reaches them.  Was it always like this and I'm just now noticing it or is this something that is buggy with my install?