Rain particle problem

[Sotha]

A boundsExpansion value of 2 won't do it, that's about 5 cm. You'd need values around 100 or more I reckon, if it helps at all.

 

I reverted to the original settings but with boundsexpansion 100, 200 and 500. No effect on the rain particle disappearance. I think I'll go with TwoFootAfro's suggestion. Now I just need to do some minor changes to each rain patch and remember to ship the modified tdm_weather.prt file with the mission..

[greebo]

Don't ship a tdm_* material file, ever. Copy the material declaration in question, rename it and save it to a new file (e.g. sothas_mission.mtr) and use that instead.

[Sotha]

Don't ship a tdm_* material file, ever. Copy the material declaration in question, rename it and save it to a new file (e.g. sothas_mission.mtr) and use that instead.

 

Will do! Thanks for the tip.

[Sotha]

Don't ship a tdm_* material file, ever. Copy the material declaration in question, rename it and save it to a new file (e.g. sothas_mission.mtr) and use that instead.

 

Now I am getting error messages that say that particles were defined in multiple files. I suppose I need to make my own material file and use custom rain texture in my mission to get rid of these error messages.

 

EDIT: yep, got rid of the error messages by making my own material files.

[Tels]

 

Change the gravity to 0, speed to -500 and the z offset to 240. Now the patch is in the middle of the rain instead of the very top, this makes it harder for the patch to go off screen while looking at the raindrops.

And since it is the speed of the particles making them fall and not gravity you can angle them for wind effects.

 

be aware that this might drop performance a lot - if the particles are longer on screen, the engine has to draw more of them.

[Sotha]

be aware that this might drop performance a lot - if the particles are longer on screen, the engine has to draw more of them.

 

Nope, no performance drops for me even when the LOD is broken and no patches are hidden.

 

This implementation only moves the rain patch location (look at the both images on page 1). The rain falls roughly the same length as before, so there are no significant amount of more particles. When the patch is closer to the player the incorrect disappearance of the particles is gone. The disappearance bug probably gained some performance, true, but there is no significant drop with patch location change when the particles are visible.

[Thor]

Hellooo. Resurrecting this topic cause a fella here seems to have figured out a cool way to make rain:

 

particle tdm_rain_light {

{

count 200

material textures/particles/drop2

time 1.000

cycles 0.000

bunching 1.000

distribution rect 50.000 50.000 32.000

direction cone "0.000"

orientation aimed 1.000 0.050

speed "-500.000"

size "0.500"

aspect "1.000"

randomDistribution 1

boundsExpansion 0.000

fadeIn 1.000

fadeOut 1.000

fadeIndex 1.000

color 0.040 0.040 0.050 1.000

fadeColor 0.039 0.043 0.047 1.000

offset 0.000 0.000 240

gravity 0

}

}

 

 

Change the gravity to 0, speed to -500 and the z offset to 240. Now the patch is in the middle of the rain instead of the very top, this makes it harder for the patch to go off screen while looking at the raindrops.

And since it is the speed of the particles making them fall and not gravity you can angle them for wind effects.

...and because I can't seem to get it working!

I'm fairly new to the concept so perhaps that's at fault here but I really think it should make sense and work.

I made a .mtr file in darkmod/materials called mysky1.mtr where I copied the quoted script to try it out. I put the newly made shader of tdm_rain_light and skinned my former rain patch with it (could this be the mistake?). It says "shader not found" all over the texture even though it directy refers to my mtr. file with all the fancy coding. Ingame Now normally I don't take this seriously, but ingame those patches are just black and there's no rain. Mmh =/

 

P.S. If anyone replies here maybe he/she knows the answer to another dumb question? I'm curious on how the "script" tab is used (between entity, media, console and textures tabs) since all the scripts seem to be happening in a saved .mtr file and stuff.

Edited November 2, 2011 by Thor