New particle effects

[Crush]

Some new particle effects:

The sourcecodes can already be found on SVN.

[Dawn]

Amazing I'd love to see it in game

[Crush]

Any idea for what they could be used?

[Jaxad0127]

The blue one would be good for when a character respawns at a soul menhir.
Can we do monsters that are just particle effects? The orange one would make a good (mini)boss type monster.

[Crush]

Can we do monsters that are just particle effects? The orange one would make a good (mini)boss type monster.

We can, but I would not suggest to do this because people with low-end computers might switch off particle effects to increase the framerate.

[feline monstrosity]

The orangey one should be used for a fireball spell in the 0.1 version!

[EJlol]

I think it looks to powerful for a normal spell.

[Crush]

...and requires too many particles.

This effect needs 1161 particles.

The maximum number of particles on one map is 3000.

About 2000 is the maximum which should be used for permanent map-based effects leaving only 1000 reserved for temporary ones like spell effects.

The effect is also quite an FPS killer. It reduces my framerate to one third of the normal framerate.

This means one of these effects can be on the screen at the same time, but when people start spamming this effect it will cause problems.

[fate]

Apart from the fact that I'm not too fond of `attack spells' (since they demote wizards to heavy artillery), the effect doesn't look too much like a fire or an explosion in that it is lacking smoke/contrast and jagged fiery edges. Admittedly, animating a good fire is nontrivial, but smoke at least is definitely possible with the particle system.

[Rotonen]

You just have to be a lot more intelligent with how you use the particles.

IMHO a particle effect which needs more than 50 particles at once could potentially be defective per design. You should not need a multitude of particles to achieve the effect: they are all about the fluent motion which fools the eye.

How about you give all the particles in the menhir effect a slight random (both direction and force, not too forcibly though) sideways diagonal initial momentum and then let them freely gravitate towards a point which is above the stone (without getting stuck and going round, short lifetime particles)?

This could be a nice constant flow effect. With for example 1-5 particles per second coming out at random intervals so there would be an average of 5-15 particles out there at once.

An additional burst of let's say 20 particles could come out when a player respawns there.

For this we need larger images to attach to the particles which fade out into the alpha channel towards the edges. Also I think we need the possibility for particles to fade in from transparent and fade out into transparent. (Sorry if I'm just clueless with this last one and it is already in there. I have not kept up to date on the technical side.)

All that said, I think we would really need one person dedicated just to fiddle around with the particle effects to find out what it can achieve and give suggestions together with feedback. Volunteers?

[Crush]

How about you give all the particles in the menhir effect a slight random (both direction and force, not too forcibly though) sideways diagonal initial momentum and then let them freely gravitate towards a point which is above the stone (without getting stuck and going round, short lifetime particles)?

Good idea, I will try that.

Also I think we need the possibility for particles to fade in from transparent and fade out into transparent. (Sorry if I'm just clueless with this last one and it is already in there. I have not kept up to date on the technical side.)

Already possible: fade-in and fade-out particle property.

All that said, I think we would really need one person dedicated just to fiddle around with the particle effects to find out what it can achieve and give suggestions together with feedback. Volunteers?

Unfortunately it seems like I am the only person on the planet who really understands the particle engine (I programmed it, after all). For that reason I started developing a particle effect design tutorial on the wiki. As you can see it is still merely a list of notes what I want to explain in what chapter.

[Modanung]

Using blobs/dots for every detail is very inefficient resulting in thousands of particles. It's better to use more detailed sprites like with the waterfall. This can greatly reduce the number of particles needed.
Spinning the particles (in a random direction with random speed) also makes it more interesting. I don't know if that's possible yet.
I just made these for the fire. Try experimenting with them. I'd love to see them in action.


The idea is to randomly pick one of these 16 sprites for every particle spawned.

[fate]

Hi,

some new particle effects for the next revision of #305:

magic sparkles

magic-sparkle-default.png (27.22 KiB) Viewed 1777 times

Teleport effect (apologies to the QfG1 designers)

teleport.png (14.9 KiB) Viewed 1777 times

`protect' effect

protect.png (27.64 KiB) Viewed 1774 times

EDIT: The `protect' effect now goes in the other direction, since the `end-of-protect' effect (not shown here) goes downwards.

-- fate

[5t3v3]

...and requires too many particles.

This effect needs 1161 particles.

The maximum number of particles on one map is 3000.

About 2000 is the maximum which should be used for permanent map-based effects leaving only 1000 reserved for temporary ones like spell effects.

The effect is also quite an FPS killer. It reduces my framerate to one third of the normal framerate.

This means one of these effects can be on the screen at the same time, but when people start spamming this effect it will cause problems.

Perrhaps it could be a rare attack of some boss-monster then?

[leeor_net]

There's also the possibility of reducing the FP calculation accuracy -- I remember there being a config setting somewhere about this but it should dramatically improve performance for users with single-core and low-end CPU's (e.g., Celeron's, Sempron's and older Pentium/Athlon class CPU's).

It may also be possible to program in an option that sets the maximum detail level for particle effects -- e.g., 'effect' type system would have their particles capped at 100 for a 'low' setting and at 400 - 600 for a 'high' setting.