JOURNAL DATE: 13.01.2010
CHANGES / UPDATES
- Weather Emitter System finished (Rain, Snow, Dust, Wind, Cloud Emitters)
- Sprite Beam Emitter finished (For drawing Light Rays, Light Beams, some Type of Lasers)
- Corona Emitter finished
- New Sprites finished (Sprites with indipendent Axis, Orientation and Smooth Scaling/Fading)
- currently working on LAST 2 Emitter Types: Spark and Trail Emitters
- currently working on on Realtime Menu-Editor for all Emitter Types (kinda difficult..)
OVERVIEWS
New Sprites
The user now has to ability to place Sprites with highly editable Orientation Options.
Sprites now orient indipently to all 3 Axis (X,Y,Z) and not all at the same time (still possible though).
In addition they now smoothly fade and scale and have standard Animation Support.
They can be used as single actors or as Particles.
Weather System
The Weather System finally has been finished.
The User is now able to draw Rain, Snow, Dust / Wind ("Stormy Sprites") AND Clouds in a Map.
In General the Weather Emitters are limitted Sprite Emitters with less Options.
All Types of Weather Emitters can be affacted by Wind Force Actors to simulate Wind and Storm.
Like the Sprite Emitter the Weather Emitters may (slowly) spin their Sprites, for example good for Snow Flakes or Clouds.
To save performance I'm currently testing and implementing a Particle Recycle System. "New" Particle aren't spawned, there're replaced to initial settings and position. Other than that there're over 20 Performance Settings by Standard...
Sprite Beam Emitter
Draw Particles connected together as a Beam, other than the normal Beam Emitter this one draws chained Sprites, which is possibly very effective for rendering Light Beams. The Sprites of this Emitter can be spinned and freely orientated to what ever you like (player, offset, some other location, a tagged actor etc.) and have indipendent Axis too.
Corona Emitter
Just like the Sprite Emitter, but draws multiple Coronas instead. Could be useful for some effects.
The Coronas support Instant-Culling and Fade-Culling AND also all already described Features of the new Sprites.
MEDIA
[youtube]s-_dXUv__1k[/youtube]
2 Sprites, both spinning slowly, one is a Z-Axis Sprite (which means it only orients around Z-Axis), the other uses all Axis.
Note: All used textures are NOT higher than 256x256 Pixels
The Cloud looks and behaves totally volumetric, through a subtle spin of the Cloud Textures no one even realises it's just Sprites...