An alternative weapon for Asgard with more light animations. I also put a black hole on it as an eye candy.

Balance: I did not perform a thorough test of its balance in combat scenarios. It indeed is very powerful, but IMO not more OP than the vanilla one.

Warning: This mod will CRASH the game if used with MSAA on! The other two anti-aliasing methods (FXAA/SMAA) seem to be fine, but I'm not sure about the stability.

Warning: This mod changes how the game handles distortion in general, so be aware it might cause problems even if you are nowhere near this weapon. And remember to turn on Distortion in X4's Graphics Settings, or the singularity effect would be invisible.

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Update April 18, 2023
Compatibility update for X4 6.0. Due to some unfortunate incident, I lost ALL my mods' 3D source files. Therefore I cannot regenerate collision mesh for X4 6.0 and the new physics engine. As a workaround, I removed collision all together for this weapon. 

NOTE 1: Due to absence of collision, this weapon cannot be hit thus is indestructible.

NOTE 2: Due to the reason mentioned above I cannot redo collision of the bullet thus I made a new one, which is simply a copy paste of the Boron L beam.
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Update April 16, 2022
I have learnt how to patch the mod files properly. This version gets rid of most of the dirty workarounds in the previous version and can now be installed like any other mods, no additional step required. Improved visuals of the blackhole so that it now integrates into the whole scene more naturally.

NOTE1: All animations in this mod are UV animation, so you can easily modify them in the corresponding xml files. 

NOTE2: This mod may not be compatible with other mods that modify  \shadergl\high_spec\xu_distortion_apply.ogl

Installation: Extract the mod files to [path to X4 root folder]\extension.
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Performance: At least it works on my computer. I cannot find a good way to handle the background, so it is black when looked through the black hole. Thus, I design the weapon model in such a way that you will seldom see the background through the black hole region.

Disclaimer: In order to create the black hole, I have to rely on some dirty tricks to get around certain technical difficulties (I just learnt a little bit of shaders because of this mod and I do not know much about how X4 renders graphics, so these might just be my own foolishness due to lack of knowledge). I do not know how many internal errors these tricks would cause in the X4 program, so use this mod at your own risk!

Installation: Extract the mod files to [path to X4 root folder]/extension. One more step: move the shadergl folder from the mod file to X4's root folder (the folder where X4.exe is located).

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Update April 9th, 2022
I found a more elegant and safer way to do the black hole. The color looks much more realistic now and the black hole region fits more seamlessly into the scene. In principle this version can be easily generalized to other large scale objects such as Anomalies, Jump Gates and even background celestial bodies.

Current drawback is I cannot make it to draw the actual 'black' part. For now, I compensate this by enabling rendering of more strongly lensed regions. In the original version, the 'black sphere' is in fact much much larger than the actual black part of a realistic Schwarchild black hole looking at a distance. I made it like this to avoid rendering the strongly lensed region that cannot be properly handled by the shader.

I put the alternative version in the optional files, in case you want to try it. Installation steps are the same.    
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