Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Big things burning

cliffski

My smoke and flame textures have always sucked, and now I’ve got a lot of proper gameplay and bug fixing done, I’m having a sneaky graphics-whore day where I make better ones.

My searches for decent smoke clouds took me here:

http://www.herts.police.uk/about/buncefield_incident.htm

Ironically, a rather famous fire in the UK not long ago. Small world etc. Flipping big flames and smoke too.

I also improved my particle effects today. a simple 5 lines of code improvement that means the first 100 milliseconds of any particles life is spent fading and growing into its initial size. This prevents particle ‘popup’ when you are zoomed in, and actually looks really good. It’s something nobody will ever notice, but if I hadn’t done it, the particles would seem less organic.

5 thoughts on Big things burning

  1. Thats great news :D

    And something i came up with when reading this:

    How about making smoke/particle emmiters be present on the underside of the ship.
    So that when a ship moves, smoke and/or particle emmiters are bursting from underneath it.
    This would make a 2D game look more 3D :)

    The same idea could be implemented for weapon “bullets”

  2. This game is looking amazing, i’ve been watching your progress since you were spotlighted on tigsource a while back, and there hasn’t been a game that I’m more excited to drop cash on since. I’m curious though: Since GSB is hands-off after the setup phase, will there be a PBEM option? If you’re not planning on it, I’d definitely encourage you to try and make it possible (somehow have the computer calculate the outcome, and both players can view a sort of “recording” of the battle??) I don’t know how the best way to code it would be, but I can tell you that I would buy a copy of this for several of my friends if this were available. I’m tired of the state of multiplayer games these days and I think this would be a refreshing change.

    Oh BTW Your visuals are top-notch, I don’t think you need to feel at all like anything ‘sucks,’ at least from the videos i’ve seen… and hey if all else fails, just let every ship explode into a super bright light ala homeworld. :) Those explosions are oh so satisfying.

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