SmoothPlume - Shader-based Engine and RCS Thrust Effect Overhaul and Wingtip Vortice Removal

After a very long period of development, version 2. 0 is now complete; this is a full remake and a significant upgrade to visual fidelity.

All ships are affected, with L and XL utilising a separate effect to the S and M engines, Boron and Xenon ships have a unique effect also.

Wingtip vortices have also been removed from all ships as they make no sense in space and I find them very annoying, if you want to restore them and have installed manually, you may delete the trail_effects.xml file from the libraries folder, but you will have to extract the cat file first.

I spent a while trying to fix some underlying vanilla game bugs but I was mostly unsuccessful due to how Egosoft have the files set up, some known bugs:

A couple of small ships' engine plume geometries have a keyframe timing issue baked into them which causes the texture to hang on a single frame, I tried everything but I was unable to get a fix to work so I hid it with the shader, it shouldn't be obvious.

A couple of larger boron ships are incorrectly set to have their manoeuvring thrusters render the same effect as the main engine, resulting in very bright RCS plumes, some might consider this a bonus as it doesn't look too bad on the heavies. I tried a lot, no fixes worked.

The Irukandji's wing-mounted engines are aligned poorly and clip outside the wing.

Large Boron ships using the Frontier engines do not display a plume, I expect they'll patch this.

Some ships using a particular cylindrical plume geometry (I noted the SE and PE as being most obvious) have a floating ring around the midsection of the effect which I didn't notice in the vanilla game.

Please report any other bugs, I hope you enjoy the mod!

Check out my other brand new mod which replaces the ugly dock forcefields: More Atmospheric Shield