Skip to main content

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!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lua-Style Coroutines in C++

Lua's implementation of coroutines is one of my all-time favorite features of the language. This (short) paper explains the whole reasoning behind the Lua's coroutine implementation and also a little about the history of coroutines. Sadly, coroutines are not supported out-of-the box by many modern languages, C++ included. Which brings me to the subject of this post: Lua-style coroutines in C++! For those who don't know (or were too lazy to read the paper!), Lua's coroutines support three basic operations: Create: Create a new coroutine object Resume: Run a coroutine until it yields or returns Yield: Suspend execution and return to the caller To implement these three operations, I'll use a great header file: ucontext.h. #include <vector> #include <ucontext.h> class Coroutine { public: typedef void (*Function)(void); Coroutine(Function function); void resume(); static void yield(); private: ucontext_t context_; std
9 comments
Read more

Warp

So, it turns out that I didn't use Criterium for the video game competition at Stanford.  I actually met a partner and went with another concept instead -- Warp.  It's kind of like Starfox and it's inspired by Rez, one of the first PS2 games.  Explosions and missiles fire in time with the music; we used ChucK , an audio processing language, to achieve this. We also made some destructible objects using rigid bodies, and I added some particle explosion effects.  We used Lua to for enemy AI, and wrote a small TCL-like script parser that reads in data for the level layout.  The buildings in the background are procedurally generated.  We used OGRE for the graphics (this was a loose requirement of the project) and Bullet for the physics.  I had a lot of fun with this project, and I've posted a video capture below.
1 comment
Read more

Sparse Voxel Octrees

Terrain implementation for games is a subject with a lot of depth. At the surface, it's very easy to get rudimentary terrain working via a noise function and fixed triangle grid. As you add more features, though, the complexity builds quickly. Overhangs, caves Multiple materials Destructive terrain Collision detection Persistence Dynamic loading Regions, biomes Very large scale Smooth features Sharp features Dynamic level of detail Extremely long view distances In isolation, each of these features can make terrain difficult to implement. Taken together, it takes a lot of care and attention to make it all work. Minecraft is probably the canonical example for terrain generation in the last generation of games. In fact, I'd say Minecraft's terrain is the killer feature that makes the game so great. Minecraft does an excellent job at 1-8, but for a recent planetary renderer project I was working on, I really wanted 9-12 too. In a series of articles, I'm planning to break do
Post a Comment
Read more