Fire!

[Huehnerschaender]

To give you some advices/hints/help I would like to know a little more about your game. You said it's a 3D strategy game. What about the camera view? Is it dynamic? Or a fixed view from top, side, etc.
Do you know how to use billboards?
What exactly do you want to know? How to make the graphics? A particle system? Explosions, fire, smoke?

Greetings,
Dirk

[Nitrogen]

I've made a few programs dealing with fire and smoke....

Have a look at
http://www.nitrogen.za.org/projectinfo.asp?id=11 - Firestorm
Dont know how effective it would be for a 3D game, you probably better off with particles, but have a look anyway, it's fun to play around with...

And here's an example of 3D billboard particles:
http://www.nitrogen.za.org/projectinfo.asp?id=16 - Smokestack

[IlovePascal]

Hello!
First of all, thank you all for your replies.

>to Savage: sorry I hadn't seen your reply, and i would be ashamed to show screenshots cos I've made lots of progress with AI and stuff, but that is not what shows on a screenshot, so no.

>to Nitrogen: I checked out your programs, the idea is pretty cool! However, I didn't manage to c the smoke one because it goes extremely fast and i dont know how to change the frequency.

>to Huehnerschaender, I understand I didnt give enough details, so let me elaborate :
It is a turn-based strategy game, inspired by Advance Wars (Gameboy), but in 3D.
camera: the camera is fixed in a way, but the environment rotates, so I guess in a way, it's as if the camera moved. To give you an idea, it's very much like Blender. Zooms, shifts, rotations.

I dont know what billboards are, so probably not.

What I had in mind was the following:
-to make was to make units explode when they are hit (a bit like your Tanx), which would be like an animation every time a unit is destroyed. So it would be a procedure that is called, does the explosion, then it all goes back to the main procedures, it is not constantly called in real time.
-to make units burn as they are not yet dead, so it would be a fire that keeps burning as the player plays. It would therefore have to be a real time animation, a dynamic fire that keeps burning.
-eventually some smoke as well, but that is not essential

The idea of a particle system sounds interesting, I have never made one, so I don't know how to start...and wouldn't that slow it down heaps tho? I heard particle systems were heavy on the RAM.

well, what else to say...? If you would like more details, don't hesitate!

C ya

[WILL]

You know if you really want to do special effects for 3D of all things, I don't think you want to remain doing it with a software renderer. You'll really want to do it with your GPU hardware.

If you seen in my <a herf='viewtopic.php?p=26041#26041'>Cyber-Crisis thread</a>, NecroDOME gave a great example of how to do explosions for example... but it involved the use of particles and rotations, scaling and blending. All of which run much nicer and faster on hardware.

I'd really recommend looking into either Direct3D, OpenGL graphical APIs. Myself, I like OpenGL's functionality and that it's cross platform. You can either use a set of headers [size=9px](DelphiGL.com, FPC Repository, JEDI-SDL's inculded OpenGL headers, NeHe's headers, etc)[/size] or use a game engine/3rd party library like GLScene, GLXtreme, the really new Phoenix engine, Rage3D, etc.

But then you might like Direct3D (D3D) instead so you can find headers for that at Clootie's site and FPC Repository should have a set or try one of the DirectX-based game libraries that support 3D. Asphyre is the only one I can think of that really does Direct3D for what you want. Anyone feel free to correct me. The current hardware accelerated UnDelphiX might fair better than the older versions but last time I looked into it, it wasn't too great. Last I checked Omega only did 2D.


But anyhow thats my suggestion. Without really knowing what graphics library or API you are using, I find it VERY hard to give you advice though.

[IlovePascal]

hey, for the explosion, the video NecroDOME put on your Cyber-crisis thread is exactly the kinda thing I want!

I am planning on reading the tutorials he avised, but at the moment I just want to say, if he reads this, that it'd be awesome if he could share the code for the explosions.
I'm not sure how he did it, is it a particle system or a whole bunch of images like the tutorial that he gave the link to?

Well, if I manage to reproduce that, it'll be awesome, and I'll only need fire (which I might be able to derive from that actually), so thanks Will, thanks NecroDOME,

impatiently waiting for replies...

[NecroDOME]

Maybe this van help:

http://www.alsprogrammingresource.com/particles.html

(OpenGL and C++)

About the fire: When you have a particle engine, the only thing you need to do is play around with it to get the effect you want...

The basics are to move, scale, rotate and blend your particles every frame.

EDIT: Forgot to past URL

http://www.geocities.com/foetsch/par.../particles.htm

[IlovePascal]

hey NecroDOME, thanks for your help, I'll read through the stuff for now, might take me a week or so to try it, so...
c u all

[Huehnerschaender]

Personally, I use Asphyre for my projects.

I tried (Un)DelhiX and GLScene before but in my opinion, Asphyre is a very great free framework which is still under development.

But using Asphyre assumes using Delphi.

The community found a way to integrate the Asphyre components to the free Turbo Delphi version. So this may be a start if you decide to use Asphyre without spending money on a new compiler.

To start, I can advise to download the latest Asphyre-package and take a look at the demos, especially Vulcano, Landscape and Combustion demo. They are included as executables, so even without Delphi you can take a look at them to get an idea about the (already included) particle system of Asphyre.

Let me know when you took a look at it.

Greetings,
Dirk

ASPYHRE homepage:

http://www.afterwarp.net

[IlovePascal]

Sorry, sorry, sorry about not replying!
It's end of year exams period here, so im into a lot of study and very very busy.

I'll try to be quick:
>Huehnerschaender : I checked the Asphyre website you advised, but couldn't find a download link! Could you please specify?

>NecroDOME : I had a look at both those links, found them very interesting indeed, and tried making a couple of particle systems myself.
I didn't manage to make anything look like fire quite yet, but I'll work on it. Thanks for the help, and there's only one thing I'm nt sure of: you say it is important to rotate the particles each frame. Why rotate? and how?

I was also wondering: should I make each particle like a couple of pixels wide and have a lot of them, or rather like on http://www.alsprogrammingresource.com/particles.html which seems to make them quite large?

Thanx a lot, sorry for not updating this often,
c ya

[Huehnerschaender]

Hi there,

don't matter about response times.

If you don't answer quick it just means you are busy with whatever and so the answer is not urgent anyway.

Try this link:

http://www.afterwarp.net/forum/thread87.html

There you get the Asphyre version 3.10 (latest version).
Notice that Asphyre 4 is under construction and will be released this month (featuring animated mesh support, pixel shader support etc). I am very exhited about the new features, they are everything I was missing in Asphyre to define it "complete".

Greetings,
Dirk