[Goober5000]

Are they possible with scripting?  Could we create arbitrary smoke and fire coming out of a fighter?  Could we create welding effects coming out of Aldo's little spacesuit guy?

[Nuke]

i can check really quick.

yea it looks like they still work, as a matter of fact my oldest script is a particle script.

[Wanderer]

Well.. we can create particle effects with scripting.

In testing (ts) 'library'

Code: [Select]

createParticle(vector Position, vector Velocity, number Lifetime, number Radius, enumeration Type, [number Tracer length=-1, boolean Reverse=false, texture Texture=Nil, object Attached Object=Nil])
    Creates a particle. Use PARTICLE_* enumerations for type.Reverse reverse animation, if one is specifiedAttached object specifies object that Position will be (and always be) relative to.
    Result: None
The flashy deaths uses particle effects, scripted flak used particle effects (glued particle to the flak shot) etc. etc.

Or something like this:


Problem when dealing with ships is that there is really no way of telling if and arbitrary point in space near the ship is inside the ship, way outside the ship or at the surface. So we can make a particle emitter that is even attached to a particular ship (and triggered by certain effects and/or be mission specific if needed etc) but AFAIK getting to appear at ships surface is not that simple.

[Goober5000]

Neato.

Would anyone be willing to create a particle effect for me?  You would be rewarded with cookies and possibly behind-the-scenes peeks at what we have in store over the next few months.

[Wanderer]

What do you need?

[Goober5000]

Welding effects.  Directed flames with sparks.  For an in-game cutscene.

[Wanderer]

That could probably be made into an function and then be called via 'script-eval' sexp... But i haven't got really any graphics (.eff) for a welding effect.

[WMCoolmon]

The most important thing to remember with the script-eval SEXP is that you can't go beyond 31 characters (the SEXP system's string maximum), so you'll have to find some way of keeping the number of variables down.

Otherwise it should behave like any other piece of Lua code.

[Nuke]

id just set a bool myself. do an if around your spark generator script (probibly on frame or in simulation), and check if the bool is true. then just used script eval to turn that bool on and off.

[DaBrain]

I would like to bring this one up again. Maybe it's possible with scripting now:

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,35194.0.html

[WMCoolmon]

You want decelerating particles. You could do that as a proof-of-concept with scripting, but as a final effect, it'd be rather meh. The effect still needs to be hardcoded so that you can handle several dozen of those without wasting massive processing power on interpreting the simple code required to get them to do that.

EDIT: Actually, given that you have the particles spaced the same way in the picture, you might be able to get away with just more frequency and a smaller lifetime?

[DaBrain]

Looks too different between flying slow (too dense!) and flying fast.

[WMCoolmon]

That makes sense. The faster the ship would go, the more 'kick' the particles would get more dense and more kick. I suppose you could do that if you could mount particle generators on ships or subsystems and change the values via scripting depending on the speed of the ship. That's kind of a long ways off right now, though, unless somebody else wants to try to code that in. I'm not sure if it'd involve updates to the particle code, but it'd certainly need more complete support in scripting (a particle generator class, etc.) and I don't have the time to do all that right now.

[DaBrain]

Do you guys think it would be possible crate to a rain or snow-like particle system?

[Topgun]

meteors!

[Goober5000]

So let's try to get back to the original request.  Would anyone be willing to create this effect for me?

[haloboy100]

By the way, since we're talking about particle effects,

What about making actual nebulae fog instead of using that damned old and annoying flat-texture method? No matter how new the graphics look in FSO, the nebulae style still being used still makes it look totally oldsckool to me when flying in a nebula.

[Wanderer]

I could make the scripting part of the effect - assuming you can provide some details on how you would like the effect to be triggered - but i really havent got any skills to do the required graphics.

[Goober5000]

Hm.  Can't you use the existing particles and sparks in the VP files (both retail and mvp)?

[Wanderer]

I suppose i could.. But then i'm gonna need more details on what exactly you want it to look... Anything would be helpful...