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Criterium: Particle Systems and Advanced Effects

Today, I was thinking about the "advanced" effects that would most benefit the realism of the game:
  • Motion blur, to give the illusion of speed.  Ogre compositors are most likely the best solution.
  • Dust particles, which would be thrown up occasionally when the bikes cross sandy portions of road.  Dust, IMO, is one of the easiest particle systems to implement well.  My Asteroids demo has some dust particle systems and textures.
  • Rain, which is also easy to implement, given Ogre's built-in particle scripts.
  • Bloom effect, one of my favorite effects, and definitely necessary for a setting sun.  I plan to use bloom to boost glare from specular highlights on the bike frame.  I used this affect in the Asteroids demo as well, and it looks quite good for highly reflective surfaces.  This can be easily done using HDR + high pass filter + Gaussian blur, and Ogre might have a compositor plugin for it.
  • Shadows, which are completely trivial with Ogre.  Awesome!

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