Particles Kickin Me In Da...

... well, you know :)

trying to get those boat wakes that i showed before, and am having two major problems...

1- the particles dissapear at certain angles because the water i'm using is translucent...

2- the speed... whent he particles are in view, the frame rate drops... then speeds up when they are no longer being rendered...

any pointers to help on either would be greatly appreciated...

thx

--Mike

You don't need 17,000,000 particles, or
You need a new card?

Hard to say, Particles don't/havent slowed my pc down in years- Maybe you should go single-surface?

running an old GeForce5200FX... that's probably one of the reasons :) and i don't hink i'm putting too many on the screen at once...

this is what i'm trying to do...




also... what about the transparency thing... any ideas on that as well Cyg...

--Mike

The FX5200 was quite a bad card. I wouldn't say it was that old, but it was actually slower than the geforce ti 4200.

Try running your game in 16-bit.

as for the transparency, I'm unsure- What do you mean when you say they dissapear because the water is translucent?

Could be a z-sorting issue with the particles disappering under the alpha'd water, if so something like this may rectify the problem.

yeah... z sorting problem... i've heard of it before...

thx guys...

--Mike

Thanks for that code archs link!
I was having z-sorting/alpha problems with my game, as well :)

Red: That screenshot looks really nice. I just have one crit: Your water appears to have been coloured a solid blue, when in fact, water is supposed to be reflecting the sky. Now, I'm not suggesting that you use a dynamic cube map or even a cube map at all. (In fact, having sharp reflections of the sky may look a bit odd. Blurred would work, though). Perhaps a little bit of code that tints the water to match the skybox would suffice.
Lots of those screenies that you posted of the water that you wished to achieve -- namely, that sea plane one which had rather greyish water to go with the rainy, cloudy sky-- had water that matched the sky, and I think it works wonders.

Just something I think you should try out some day :)

Anyway, back to Z-Sorting!

no... you're right Mr. P... that shot does look pretty bad... good critique...

i had my reflections class disabled, and the gamma turned way down (my eyes were all but burnt out after a frustrating ten hour session)...

as a matter of fact, your cubemap suggestion is the way i'm going with this ( a drastic mod of the Fredborg water)



( you can see his sky is still hangin up there :) )...

i just need to come up with something that looks like a ship's wake when the subs get up to speed... i dunno, those particles were a lil messy, and expensive, performance wise...

ahhh tommorrow's another day... i'm dead...

thx for the input...

--Mike

good luck Red, i know you can do it. :)

This stuff is nasty y'know. At least you've got something workable here, when you figure out the particles then you're set, right?

I know you can do it! Repeat after me:

We want Sub Force! We want Sub Force!

ps: fix yur friggin homepage link wud ya Red! ;)

thx muk... i'm trying... as a matter of fact, this particles issue revealed a weakness in my Blitz3D OO engine...

i think i went overboard in the application of OO to everything in the game... certain types don't need to be handled in the OO objects loop, and leaving them out would benefit the performance of the engine...

particles for example, since they are being created and destroyed continuously, can only serve to slow down or speed up the loop... definitely not desireable...

reflection objects as well... their logic is so single minded as to make them a candidate for removal from the game objects loop... every lil bit should help... i'm doing this now...

yeah... that web site... gotta get to it... eventually :)

--Mike

Really the answer is to opt for a realistic limit and distribute them evenly so the limit is never exceeded no matter how many generators are asking to spit particles out. Make the system scalable and it should please those with beefy and [cough!] "less beefy" cards alike.


Bwa-ha-HAAAAAAA! Dude, I totally TOLD YOU SO! :P Nail down everything you reasonably can, then superglue it, then put some more nails in it for good measure. Sod reusability (so what if you can't use your sub game as the basis for a mountaineering sim?) and get it running fast 'n' dirty! You know you want to.

i said i might have went overboard... i didn't say i was abandoning it... :P so there... haa...

:)

it's just that some simple functionality doesn't need to be included in my OO game objects loop... that's all...

you're right about limiting the particles... done that... i've got something that looks halfway decent... and performance is good... gonna mod the engine like i said above and see what the results are...

--Mike

lol. I had to bite my lip when I read "i think i went overboard", too. :P

It is possible to over-engineer something, y'know! :)

yup... blindly racing where no man... no sane man, has gone before...

:)

--Mike

How abouts are you using the particles to create the wake effect btw? hard to see in those two shots, but it looks like you're using a bunch of seperate particles together to create the look, where you could just have a single texture of the wake-itself used multiple times (to create a trail of the remains) no?

I thought you were using DBPRO?

yup... multiple particles combined... this is for the bow wake and the waves along the side of the sub as it moves...

tell me more about using the texture itself to create the trail...

thx

--Mike

* big10p slaps Matt with a large trout.

:P

Well when I see pictures like this :
http://images.google.ca/images?q=ship+wake&hl=en&btnG=Search+Images

it looks like you can reproduce the effect by having a "water foam" texture, place at the front of the sub, then create an array of them (or type, whichever you prefer), each one positioned behind the next following the parent wake particle in a snake-like fashion (so you're not constantly creating new particles on the fly to achieve the same look), and lower the alpha of it, possibly scaling the size down as well if you want, since the camera appears to be close I cant see there being any Z-sorting issues as that normally happens at farther distances iirc.

Unsure of how to achieve that using a single-surface engine unless you already got one setup, would probably involve using vertex-alpha on each wake instead of entityalpha.

thx G... sounds good...

--Mike

ok... all done for the day... i think i've got something that works and looks ok...

i finally had to put back in some code i recently commented out, that controlled the speed of the logic loop...

the weird thing was that i had to slow down the logic flow so that it wouldn't run faster than the refresh rate... this was what was causing the slowdown when many particles were on screen, and the speed up when the view wasn't looking at em...

this also smoothed out the jerkiness and slowdown when text was being printed in the graphics mode...

of course, this required me to redo the rates at which i had everything moving and accelerating in the program, but now i can hardly notice the difference...

anyways... i look at it again tommorrow... gotta get in and out of the shower, and get dinner ready before BattleStar Galactica tonight... the season finale (already) is on tonight :)

--Mike