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

Explosive fun

There is a todo list for the Gratuitous tank Battles beta, and something not officially on it (because nobody mentioned it) was to make the explosions and flames and so-on look better. People keep telling me they look great, but I want them to look tons better. That means a lot of tweaking, optimising and theorizing.

It’s amazing how many variables you need to get particles looking right, and then how much more code. I have special code for flames, for flamethrowers, for ground bursts, for smoke plumes, for debris, for emitters attached to moving units… and so on. It’s quite a spaghetti mess of complicated and differently designed systems, but it seems to work.

Hopefully by the time the game ships to final release, the effects will look a lot better. It’s one of those things I really enjoy coding (even on Good Friday when i should be eating chocolate!), so I can often justify silly amounts of time on it.

I also have grand plans for target designation laser effects, flickering shields and pulsing damage textures, but not enough hours in the day. How annoying…


4 thoughts on Explosive fun

  1. Could you please make it so that clickable images on your blog take you to a higher resolution version? I don’t see the point of having images clickable otherwise, and kinda get disappointed every time I click an image to view it in more detail… :(

  2. Complex phenomena is usually just the blending of many many smaller systems of things.

    It would make sense to get certain effect you want you do ‘one thing and one thing correct’ then combine that one thing with the next thing.

  3. From a developers perspective it would be cool if you were to blog about how you do it, techniques and methods that work to make great looking particle effects.

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