By Khaak_Slayer aka PurpleFire

12/07/2021
Version 1.0

Dear player, thank you for trying my mod, you are clearly an X-citizen of great taste.

I hope you enjoy this and that it enhances your game! Feel free to use this as a basis for your own mod, hopefully it inspires something in you. Modding is super easy and fun.

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One of the very first things I noticed when I loaded up the game for the first time was how they were still using that old rotating-animation style engine thrust texture from back in X3. I remember thinking how cool it looked at the time along with the rest of X3, which was a good upgrade from X2.
X4 has brought the universe such a long way since, and is such a beautiful game in many ways. But this engine texture just looks so jarring to me whenever I see it. It's the most obvious on the travel engines which honestly look terrible in vanilla.

It's my opinion that none of the engines need an animated texture, especially as the rest of the engine glow effects look so good. I solved this visual problem and also made it look a lot more realistic by just replacing the engine thrust texture with a cleaner and more subtle gradient. If you zoom in far enough you can still see a slight texture around the core of the plume which looks nice with the animation loop.

The texture applies to all engines including XL; the game shapes it to the engine. It doesn't touch the RCS thrusters as I don't think that effect looks too bad the way it is.

Both the main texture and the alpha texture are edited. Both of these files had a half-resolution counterpart with "-small" added to the filename, these didn't seem to be listed anywhere in the content library and don't appear to be used anywhere so I omitted them, but if you notice something amiss please report it.

I'll also upload this to my Nexus account here: