Last time I said the skill effects will never be a perfect copy of the original. The client’s particle system and Godot’s are different in enough small ways that some things just cannot be matched one to one. I can get close, but close is the ceiling.

So instead of fighting that forever, I went a different way. Every effect can now exist twice.

Two versions of everything

There are two effect sets now, and a switch in the game to pick between them:

• Legacy Lineage II is the faithful one. It is the original client effect, rebuilt as closely as Godot lets me. This is the default, and it is what all of Part 7 was about.
• New is my own. Same skill, same timing, but the look is rebuilt from scratch with Godot shaders, new particles and my own textures. It is not trying to be the original. It is trying to look good with the tools I actually have.

The New set falls back to Legacy for any skill I have not made a new version of yet, so nothing is ever missing. You just get the original until the new one exists.

Death Spike, both ways

Death Spike is the first one I did in both. The video runs it as Legacy, then flips the switch and runs it as New, so you can see the same skill two ways back to back.

How the new ones are made

The picture at the top is a New effect being built. That is the Death Spike cast, and what is open at the bottom is a shader I wrote as a node graph: a couple of noise textures scrolling over each other at different speeds to make the swirling column. Behind it is a small library of effect textures, noise, sparks, flares, smoke, that I can reuse across skills.

This is the part that is only possible because it is Godot and not the 2007 client. The original effects are locked to what the old engine could draw. The new ones can use things the old engine never had, so they can be sharper and move better, at the cost of not being the real thing. That is exactly why both exist and you get to choose.

Where this leaves me

So now there are two effect sets and a switch, and Death Spike is done in both. Most skills are still Legacy only, so the New set is going to fill in slowly, one skill at a time, same as before. But the shape of it is there: keep the faithful version for people who want the real Lineage 2, and build a nicer one next to it for people who want that instead.