Playing with Fire...

[jasonf]

I had an hour or so to spare last night so I thought I'd experiment with putting my procedural fire effect into my game.

DAMN, it's slow :lol: My heat weapon is supposed to burn the landscape so I thought my fire effect would be quite nice (if you don't know what I'm talking about, I did a fire effect ages ago see here (http://www.cerebral-bicycle.co.uk/viewdoc.asp?doc=93) and translated it to Pascal) Trouble is, as pretty as it is, it's very processor intensive. So I've decided to drop the idea in favour of a more traditional animated design.. it's more important to keep the frame rates up than to make pretty fires.

I did a search online last night for fire animation and the sites which had actual animations had stolen them from games which I recognise.. so I won't be using those.

I was wondering if anyone knows of any good tools for generating explosions and fire which export as bitmaps so I can put them into my game? I don't mind paying for it as long as it's good.

[Firlefanz]

I had some free ones I used in Xenidis and also Commando Xenidis.
They put out some animated bitmaps of an explosion.

I also made an own for fire-rings.

Maybe I can search later for those, right now I am moving houses.

Firle

[dmantione]

There is a fire generator as demo in PTCPas. It gives good frame rates.

[jasonf]

@Firlefanz, if you could dig out that generator, I'd appreciate it.

@dmantione, what it PTCPas?

I'm actually a little bit annoyed that my fire code was so slow :( I was hoping that it would be fast enough for a real-time effect. I could always pre-render the fire myself over a few frames, but it sort of defeats the object.

I need something like this... but for less than $300 http://www.wondertouch.com/

I was sent a link a while back for a quite good particle generating application... at the time I was doing 3D.. I should have kept the app demo :(

Anyone know a good procedural explosion and fire generating application?

[jasonf]

Just found this, looks quite nice... not 100% for particles though, but maybe useful

http://www.texturemaker.com/screenshots.php

[dmantione]

PTCPas is a low-level graphics library suitable for writing platform independent 2D games. It can be compared to SDL, but is written fully in Pascal. http://ptcpas.sourceforge.net/

[Nitrogen]

You could always try Firestorm...

http://www.nitrogen.za.org/projectinfo.asp?id=11

It's not exactly made for this type of thing, but it does generate pretty fire and you can save the frames as bmps...

[jasonf]

I think I saw this not so long ago. It's pretty cool stuff.
It could really use an export as frames option (hint hint ;))

I've still got it downloaded I think.. if not, I'll get it again and see if I can make anything from it.

[Nitrogen]

You can save the frames... There's a button called Save to Pictures and you can choose how many frames to render...

[WILL]

Hey thats is pretty darn cool Mike! :)

I'm wondering if I might be able to use it to create a small magic effect for Garland's Quest? Capability-wise and permission-wise. ;)

(Thats if it's capable of making a full sequence of 80x100 sprites with up to 30 frames)


So you haven't found a way to code a fire effect that won't take too much cpu juice away from your game? I'm surprised. One of the most popular effects in the demoscene was the fire effect, there has to be one that is easy to do and is cheap on the processing.

There must at least be one that you can convert from some old C code.

[Nitrogen]

Permission is no issue, what you make with it is yours completely..

Capability wise, well, it'll only output the 400x400 area, you'd have to crop each image manually.

I'm busy working on a particle engine at the moment, which should be capable of making some cool real time fire..

Check out what it looks like so far:

<a href="http://www.nitrogen.za.org/viewimage.asp?id=60">
http://www.nitrogen.za.org/gallery/thumbs/Particles3.jpg</a>

<a href="http://www.nitrogen.za.org/viewimage.asp?id=59">
http://www.nitrogen.za.org/gallery/thumbs/Particles2.jpg</a>

[jasonf]

I have found the particle program I was talking about earlier in an old folder. It is called ExGen.

http://www.binarysun.co.uk/free-games/exgen/