Appletree Particle Effect

[zipon]

ill been trying to learn how the particle engine works and got the ideer to make the apples fall off the appletree.

So here is my first attempt to make that effect.
there will be more then 1 particle and its random where it spawn at the tree



Particle Effect file:

file

hope you like it.

[Crush]

Nice to see that there is someone else beside me who tries some stuff with the particle engine. But I would suggest you to give the apples no initial velocity (power 0) and accelerate them through gravity. This would lead to more realistic falling physics.

[zipon]

Hey Crush

is there a way to tell the particles not to fall to the target when useing the acceleration emitter?

Picture:



File:

Appletree effect file

[Crush]

acceleration is always acceleration towards a target. When you want acceleration towards the ground or away from the ground use gravity. When you want acceleration in the current direction of the particle (whichever it is) use a momentum slightly larger than 1.0 but this will give you a quadratic instead of a linear increase in speed.

[zipon]

here is a new version a the appletree particle effect.
I have set the power level to 0 and the effect is only useing the gravity emitter now.

file:
Applev3

[Falcata]

What you guys could do with this is allow players to kick or shake apple trees, with a random chance of them dropping an apple as an item that can be picked up.

It would be best to give it a slim chance of happening, so that it takes luck and/or persistence to get the item. Alternatively, it could be set up so that each tree has one apple that can be dropped. Once it is dropped, the tree won't drop another apple until a certain amount of time has passed.

[Modanung]

What you guys could do with this is allow players to kick or shake apple trees, with a random chance of them dropping an apple as an item that can be picked up.

Hey, you know what this makes me think? Maybe dropped items should be implemented as particles. It could make a small hop when the creature drops the item and be launched in a random direction.

And maybe more of these item disposers could be a nice idea. Maybe like a canned drinks dispenser or items that wash onto the shore or down a river.

And that makes me thing maybe items could follow the stream of a river when dropped in one. But that could be implemented when agreed to make the graphical part of the river itself by using particals that follow a path, or actually the area between two paths/curves. Would be cool if we had puzzles that use the floating items in there solve. Like a bomb that needs to blow aways some rocks you can't acces to fill a gap or something.

[Rotonen]

Yes we should really utilize the particle engine more.

I suggested a theme month of development in summertime, but never had the time.

[Crush]

Hey, you know what this makes me think? Maybe dropped items should be implemented as particles. It could make a small hop when the creature drops the item and be launched in a random direction.

That's harder than it seems. First: The direction the item appears isn't random but determined by the server. Second: The netcode assumes that the player is informed about the position of the items immediately. Third: The server doesn't say what monster dropped an item. So the client would have to guess.

But that could be implemented when agreed to make the graphical part of the river itself by using particals that follow a path, or actually the area between two paths/curves.

Sorry, but this is completely outside of the scope of the particle engine.

It's as if we would have a toaster and you would suggest to cook soup with it. It is not impossible but you would have to do a lot of complicated modifications. You would have to coat the heating coils with a material that is not conductive but transports heat. You have to make sure all internal cables are waterproof isolated. And you would have to seal off all chinks and holes in the toaster so that the soup doesn't drip out.

But it would be much easier to build a new system specialized on cooking soup like a stove and a pot. Or in our case: Animated map tiles!

Using animated map tiles would be much less complicated in implementation and more convenient for the map designer than fidling with waypoints or transport zones. It would also be much less CPU intense to calculate the animation phase of one 32x32 pixel tile instead of calculating the physics and drawing the dozends of independent particles that would be necessary to cover the same area (didn't you complain that the TMW client got too slow, Rotonen?).