Hard Light Productions Forums

Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: Sandwich on July 25, 2006, 06:04:24 pm

Title: Particle Explosions, Revisited
Post by: Sandwich on July 25, 2006, 06:04:24 pm

I'm referring to this thread (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,29773.0.html), of course.

Was there any progress on this front? I bring this up because I just recently watched the BSG Mod Team's capship flak battle video, and it truly looks jaw-dropping - with one exception... those darned intersecty 2D explosions.

Now that I think of it, the same kind of intersecting yuckage can been seen - to a lesser extent -  in nebulae missions.

Which makes me think that solving either would provide a way to solve both.

Which reminds me of the best particle (AFAIK) nebulae effects I've seen yet, in Freelancer (or was it in I-War 2? No matter...). Actually, it was on the deck of the carrier in the Crysis demo video, but there is such as thing as aiming too high... ;)

Anyway, yeah... what's the latest on this front?

EDIT: If particles are still unrealistic, how about something akin to the attached picture? It reminds me of the 2D effects in Particle Illusion.

[attachment deleted by admin]

Title: Re: Particle Explosions, Revisited
Post by: A2597 on July 25, 2006, 07:29:37 pm

The obvious answer to me, is combine the two.

You take the standard sprite explosion, and add matching particles to it...and alot of them.

Basically, you take the sprite explosion as layer one

layer two is some BIG particles, animated ones, that disapear quickly, but have the effect of masking the image intersection.

then you have particles of all sizes flying out at various speeds in all directions.

And voila, a beautiful kaboom.

Title: Re: Particle Explosions, Revisited
Post by: Axem on July 25, 2006, 07:36:53 pm

I had some success making quasi-particle explosions with scripting. It wasn't perfect, it only worked well with small craft like fighters or containers.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v109/NarfPics/particles5.jpg)

Title: Re: Particle Explosions, Revisited
Post by: Nuke on July 25, 2006, 11:29:10 pm

hows the fps hit on that axem? all my attempts at using particles usually result in about 6 fps :D

Title: Re: Particle Explosions, Revisited
Post by: Axem on July 26, 2006, 10:19:52 am

The FPS hit isn't that bad, but earlier versions had a big problem with taking up too much memory. Textures would start to vanish after awhile. So I added some stuff to limit the number of particles, but I haven't worked on it since then.

Title: Re: Particle Explosions, Revisited
Post by: Wanderer on July 26, 2006, 02:48:53 pm

Perhaps :nervous: the amount of particles drawn per frame could be bumped?

Title: Re: Particle Explosions, Revisited
Post by: taylor on July 26, 2006, 03:07:28 pm

Quote from: Wanderer on July 26, 2006, 02:48:53 pm

Perhaps :nervous: the amount of particles drawn per frame could be bumped?

I already made it dynamic.  You'll only hit the limit when run out of memory. :)