OK, here’s the effect I wanted to show you earlier. I made this in your style using three different shaders and two different particle effects. It’s a bit more visually complex than the system you’re going for, but still works within the same style. It does have a bit of overdraw because of the transparency, but it takes a lot of measures to run efficiently and not waste so much CPU power. For one, it only uses a few meshes for the clouds. Everything else is using GPU sprites. The water effect shader is unlit while the clouds are opaque and the solid round mist particles are masked opaque. Hopefully this can help you think of something. If I wanted to take this particular system a step further, I’d model more than one cloud mesh and delay that emitter so I can have a variety of different cloud formations. I’d also make a more artistic style for the water particles instead of just a circle.
Agreed, it looks really nice. I will try and implement something similar when I get a chance. How did you get the particles to bound along the ground. Are you using gravity?
Thanks! I’m using GPU scene-depth collisions with a constant acceleration to simulate gravity. It uses the G-buffer (basically per-pixel data from the scene) to model the collision of the particles, and the negative acceleration basically does the same thing gravity would do to pull the particles downward. It renders really nicely and much more efficiently than CPU collisions. There’s also some drag from the drag module to make it feel like the particles have some weight.
It’s just another solution that you could use if you want to amp up the complexity. GPU particles are not supported on mobile, though, and GPU collisions don’t work with masked or otherwise opaque materials, so if you’re thinking of doing something like this, it would have to be your high-end solution for PC and the PS4. You’d need to use something else for mobile. To help define the shading, you can use lit particles for the water to make it fit nicer within your world, but that would also cost a bit more. I have zero experience with the PS4, but I can imagine a system like this would kill a 1080p, 60 FPS target.
I found the const acceleration after an age of trying to use the point gravity but thanks for getting back to me. I have no plan to release to phones, its PS4 and Steam only. I need to have more of a play with the GPU particles but I’m think it may be too noisy for the games style. I will definitely look into it more though and see if I can get something that has a nice balance. You will be happy to know I have swapped over to GPU for the snow however and its really ramped up the blizzard so I can get a good range of weather in the arctic themes Thanks again for all your input!
Haha, glad I could help! GPU particles should be used in as many cases as possible because they can render without needing any CPU support or hogging CPU cache memory (there is a small CPU usage for spawning, but that happens very fast). Epic said you can have millions of particles, but I’ve been noticing that in the hundreds of thousands you’ll need to make the particles smaller than a pixel in order to notice them, and making them any larger would create massive overdraws of transparent particles overlapping each other.
I am really, really excited to see this game! Good luck!
Are you going for a sort of hub area likle diddy-kong racing?
If so you should have secret areas + tokens to find, I love games with hub areas where you can just chill out between races or whatever. Also it helps keep things varied too, which you probably need in a racing game.
I love this. the simplified graphic style gets a real boost from the lighting. some of the textures might have too much specular. (I just noticed, that stone pillar at the arc above seems a bit shiny)
I saw the pic in the 1-19-2015 post, and when you said there are going to be different bears. For a split second I thought you might have a part of a track that when I bear goes through he turns into a gummy bear for a X amount of time.
I’m aiming to release around May/June time for PS4 and Steam. Though I have never developed for PS4 before so I will probably hit a lot of hurdles at some point Glad you like it
Thanks again for all your input!
