Waterarrow Effect

[rebb]

I fiddled around a bit with a new Waterarrow splash effect, and this is how it looks so far ( beware horrible gif Animation made from Screenshots ) :

 

 

It uses less particles overall, some different Textures and has less of a blueish tint.

Looks more like an instant "watery explosion" instead of the "quickly pouring" current Effect.

 

Comments welcome .

[New Horizon]

From what I see in the gif, it looks great.

[Springheel]

I quite like it!

[jdude]

I like it better too, I thought the last one was too uniform. Does this change in accordance to the lighting though? I know the last one didn't and it sometimes looked far to bright in dark areas.

[rebb]

I like it better too, I thought the last one was too uniform. Does this change in accordance to the lighting though? I know the last one didn't and it sometimes looked far to bright in dark areas.

 

The only way to make it react to lighting, that i'm aware of, would be to use an alphatested diffuse with optional bumpmap etc, but then it would look very hard-edged and not very waterlike. It would be possible to darken it based on what is behind the water sprites, tho that will likely look wrong as well.

[New Horizon]

I think it will work quite nicely.

[SneaksieDave]

@rebb: How does the depth hacky-ness hold up, particularly when aiming at angles up/down? That is a problem with the current one, but it was necessary to reduce flicker and vanishing of the particle.

 

I like this so far as well. It'd be really great if there was randomness to where the "blotches" go, but I'm not sure how possible that would be with the design. The only thing (from the gif) that rubs me a bit wrong is the impact splash, particularly the straight streaks that fly off. I was going for something like that originally too, so I know what you're aiming for. Maybe if they were more 'poofy' instead of 'streaky'? I don't know.

 

It is tough to get the brightness right, because it has to be visible to the player (feedback) in both light and dark conditions, but so far this looks good.

[Springheel]

I think you can go ahead and upload this one Rebb, so we can see it in action.

[rebb]

@SneaksieDave

 

The DepthHack setting is the same as in the current Effect, so it probably has the same problems.

 

Regarding the randomness, do you mean the sprites being spawned and moving more randomly ? Turns out that there was already the needed setting for that in the weapon_arrow_result_base.script, it was just commented out.

 

I hope it's ok to uncomment that again .

[SneaksieDave]

Ah I see. About the randomness; yes, basically how there is a heavy blotch going off to the right in the gif, it'd be great if that and whatever other puffs/blotches there might be, go wherever, instead of always falling uniformly as with the current particle. It's tough to make individual clumps move (not one, but also not all) and look good, but if there's a solution in code, great. That's how the candle jitter was achieved (code, not particle).

[rebb]

The line in the waterarrow result Script that sets ShaderParm5 actually causes things to be more random ( its a bit of a weird System having to do that ).

Anyway its on the CVS since yesterday, if someone has any critique/ideas for that version just say it .

[jdude]

I just tried this and I must say it looks way better than before! I love it