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

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

Password Generator for Chrome

This week, I finally got fed up with typing in/managing passwords on a billion different sites. Since things like OpenID haven't really taken off, I decided to take matters into my own hands...and write a password generator extension for Google Chrome. There are actually a ton of such apps on the Chrome web store, but I'm paranoid about security, so I wrote my own and open-sourced it. By virtue of being open source, perhaps people will trust my version a bit more. Anyway, the extension is available here , and the source code is hosted at github . May all your online transactions be secure! UPDATE: Fixed github link.
2 comments
Read more