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So, what are you working on right now?


Springheel

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Thanks. There's a second menu board, not shown, with additional "supper" items. Some of the offerings on the menu boards reflect the TDM food models shown in the kitchen. Overall, the listings riff on historic foodstuffs from the tables and diets of rich and poor, chiefly in England, France, and Germany.

The menu board texture started with a photo of slate, then laid a Photoshop font atop. The text characters were wavered and scratched to suggest chalk handwriting. The item listings alternate subtly between white and light yellow "chalk".

 

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Cool. Just so I understand that, does that mean you can have one big snow emitter across the level, and put in some buildings, and the particles will not pass through the roof so it snows inside? If it's that, that'll be really handy!

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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3 hours ago, stgatilov said:

Yes, exactly. One particle deform patch over the whole level.
That what you already can do with rain in 2.08.

Keep in mind that particle count is not infinite. Snow looks less dense than rain, so making such a heavy snow everywhere can be bad for performance.

I hereby award you with the new title "The Weather Maker" ! :)

Very cool, you've elimintaed all problems coming with rain and snow effects that prevented me till now from using the related features.

Edited by JackFarmer
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Very nice @stgatilov
 Would this also support LOD in some way? One of the advantages of having multiple smaller rain emitters is that you could apply hide distance spawnargs to them.

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33 minutes ago, Dragofer said:

Very nice @stgatilov
 Would this also support LOD in some way? One of the advantages of having multiple smaller rain emitters is that you could apply hide distance spawnargs to them.

Do you mean limited field of vision that covers everything nearby like in Silent Hill 1 in order to help performance?

"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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1 hour ago, Dragofer said:

Would this also support LOD in some way? One of the advantages of having multiple smaller rain emitters is that you could apply hide distance spawnargs to them.

Not yet.

Actually, if you have one patch over whole level, then it gets splitted into one surface per visleaf area. These surfaces should be culled by camera and portals individually. So such approach should be OK as long as there are no large outdoors areas.

However, you are not forced to use one patch. You can have many patches/entities with same particle deform material, it should work just as well. As far as I understand, your workflow consists of making one quad patch with proper settings, then copy/pasting it over the whole area.

 

I would say simply hiding distant rain/snow is a poor solution. The many tiny particles in the far look like a "snowy texture", which would be missing if you hide them. The better LOD system for particles should switch between different particle systems, where the most detailed system has one snowflake per particle, and the less detailed have many snowflakes packed into one particle.

I guess it is possible to implement something like this right now with a script, using workflow similar to what you describe: configure one patch, then copy/paste it over the whole level. Of course, it is possible to implement such system in the game code, but I'd probably avoid it if a good script plus copy/pasting is enough 😁

 

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@stgatilov the LOD system also supports changing models based upon distance, so it should be possible to switch between particles just by applying spawnargs. And DR lets you select entities with the same classname, so these spawnargs can be tweaked after the patches have been created. So mappers would be good to go with multiple smaller LOD-enabled patches and without scripts involved, just spawnargs.

The only remaining hurdle to your approach would be to have new particles that contain multiple snowflakes per sprite. I'm guessing that'd require a fair bit of manual labour, i.e. making textures with multiple snowflakes and increasing the size of the sprites. Might be more feasible for a busy mapper to just switch to less dense snow particles in the distance.

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