By particle trails I mean the little fiery stuff when you hit a target. Since daveb thought it'd be neat to upgrade the FS2 engine to the DirectX 8.1 standard, here's my proposal: replace the particle glows with pointsprites. Several advantages:
1) The effect is much more realistic-looking, complete with the "streaking" effect when the particles are in motion.
2) We can add bits to the code to make for race-specific glowtrails (i.e. gold for Terran, green for Vasudan, red for Shivan)
3) Darn it, it just looks cool.
Of course, the major downfall with this technique is that not all video cards support it. I know it works on a Geforce3/4 (since that's what I'm using), but how's I get user feedback on the effect? I've got a demo you can download
here.
Please note you will have to have the latest version of DirectX to even see the effect.Just a slightly tweaked version of the DX81SDK sample.
As it's currently set, the glow doesn't shoot up very high. Since the current particle trails in FS2 don't go fountaining out of a corvette when you shoot it, I thought the same should be applied to this.
There's even a framerate counter in the corner (and this demo supports reflection mapping, but you can turn that off
)
I am having problems with it, however. First and foremost, I can't tell the thing to kill the old particles when they get to so high off the ground. Therefore, I can't tell it to use zero-gravity in the demo to properly simulate what it'll do in the FS2 engine. If you want to see the source for it, I'll post up the link.
