OpenGL lightning effect...

[savage]

Hi All,
I wanted to create an OpenGL lightning effect, with thunder sound effect, and wondered if just turning an OpenGL light on and off randomly would be sufficient to get the mood across?

Essentially this will appear on the main menu and when the light is on it would highlight the background image.

Also for a rain drop effect, would it be best to use a texture or draw the drop effect manually using circle routines?

All thoughts/suggestions welcome.

[Clootie]

Have you seen latest ATI Toy Shop demo: rain drops, etc...
Just kidding

[savage]

Don't I wish

[JernejL]

Also for a rain drop effect, would it be best to use a texture or draw the drop effect manually using circle routines?

All thoughts/suggestions welcome.

youre kidding, what you need is a rain drop texture, and simple transluscent alpha channeled particle quads, you don't need circles!!

[Paulius]

Argument you?¢_Tre statements Delfi, maybe he does need circles for ripples or something, a circle would be split in lots of triangles, but it could hardly be an issue for a menu. For lightning a white quad blended on top with its alpha along with scenes ambient component synced to thunder sound volume should do nicely.

[JSoftware]

just color the background. 0,0,0 when there's no thunder. and set color to 1,1,1 when there comes a thunder and slowly decrease it downto 0,0,0 again when the thunder is over

a simple looping animated texture with raindrops splashing and fading out should do the trick with the rainy thing. maybe a little particle system could be a fine supplement. you could eventually blend two of the animated raindrop textures with different scaling/positioning for variation