Well for the fire, I thought the light reflection should be stronger when the flame is at its thickest close to the reactors. (notice that the frame with the strongest light is the one where the flame is short and fat). But maybe youre right about this, ill try changing the light and see if I like it more.
The reactor reflection should vary less than that and be more of a constant light, but I wanted a strong flicker on the back to be very obvious, I think it looks better.
For the beginning of the ship's crash animation, it does look odd this way, but as I said ill throw in smaller explosions before the big one, and I think it will look much better then.
About the turning animation, as I said on the first post, its because some ships start out on the ground, and I wanted them to look different when landed, so that when its about to lift off, some movement warns you before it zooms towards you. I also thought of putting some ships that fly further away in the background, can turn and change "planes" to go to the players'. That would require some nasty work, but most of the movement will be when the ship is far off in the background, so the sprite will be smaller and easier to animate. the current turn animation (with the addition of flames coming out of the thrusters) will be the final little anim that, again, warns the player that the ship is on its level and is dangerous to him now.
(Whats nice with this, is that then I don't need to create different movement patterns for ships that come from the ground or from the background: both simply start with the turning anim in the same way. So I just create the ship objects at the moment they become active, and the rest works by itself. For ships that dont either come from the background or the ground level, ill simply create them away from the players' line of sight, so the player wont see the now out-of-place turning animation. You see what I mean?)
