Friday, 29 April 2011

More pyro events and secondaries

Expanded the pyro-fx to let me chain events for doing secondary explosions, or ammo cook-off (complete with audio). Turned out pretty good, added some random tints to smoke, fire scale and audio pitch variation to sell a scene of burning carnage. Someone asked for smoke plumes, by golly we've got smoke plumes.

I was quite pleased with the final blast wave effect, a combination of simple expanding geometry and increasing light radius (with intensity as inverse square falloff) sells it. Almost all done in code and one texture file. There's a key that if present swaps out a destroyed model for another mesh to give a bit of control over the look of some objects, such as specials we might want to add later.

As fires die out it secondary smoke plumes are timed to spawn. I'm not using transparent smoke (although it's available), I don't think a 3D card has been built yet that could handle this scene with coloured smoke effects but when they do it would really give it some gravity. We'll keep that feature off-line for now. We'll add some notes to the vehicle database to govern secondary explosions and smoke quantities.

Impact craters from explosions now despawn after their allocated number has been reached.




Fixed some arming issues relating to ground height and AD had an interesting notion to link stores availability to the quantity of ammo crates laying around. It's a nice idea but I'm chewing over practical issues, campaign system should not have to do a stock take and count 3D world entities, it should be one way otherwise madness might ensue. But I like the idea of a visual representation of stores availability and it's no hardship to have an ammo crate flag a stores reduction at a base when it gets freed. So it could be made to work and keep me happy.

Ended the day working on more core simulation code (looking at the powertrain system again and getting numbers to test engine timing / temp functions).

Smoking or non...oh wait.

7 comments:

  1. it's cool to see that all take shape, great work !

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  2. That is a very good effect... interesting that they arent transparent. The tapering of smoke output associated with fire is really immersive Flex.

    Does the smoke move with the wind by chance?

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  3. A wind vector will be applied to all particle effects when it's available in the environment object. Unless it looks really terrible.

    When I talk about transparent smoke, I mean smoke that casts shadows, so light shining through smoke is attenuated. It's quite a next gen effect and pretty awesome. I saw a Battlefield 3 video recently with it in but nowhere near as dense as this stuff (due to the performance issue associated with it I guess).

    This smoke is transparent depending on density. But above all it's obvious at reasonable distance.

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  4. I thought that the smoke will be badly looked after the first attempts week ago,but now I must cite Pavel-wow, just WOW :O it looks amazing, especially the smoke getting thicker on top.Respect , something amazing.I wonder how the performance, if will not be decreased by 50% it will be wonderful;)

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  5. It's just numbers thrown into a pot. This is pass number 2 on those effects. No doubt we'll be tweaking them later for performance and appearance. Is one of those things you can keep playing with forever.

    With a better particle engine it could be vastly improved I'm sure. The trick with particle performance is avoiding too much overdraw.

    Again it's all down to the fill rate of your 3D card. You'll be able to change the particle density settings in options.

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  6. In my opinion, definitely the best screenshots
    what you posted on this blog :)
    Awesome job, , keep it up.

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  7. I'm off to find me some marshmallows :)

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