dust trails

[Doomweaver]

I reckon vehicles need dust trails, and I think the (vel*weight) of a vehicle should govern the amount of dust that comes off it.
And it should be affected by wind. (haha, my 500 flashes create a smokescreen!)

[Cheesecan]

Well depending on terrain, I think they already have such a feature now or planning it though it's pretty basic.

[BlackLiger]

Its in, just not very thick dust and it can be turned off for lower end PCs. Therefore a person can just neutralise your smoke screen by lowering the particles setting. Like in halo where ppl use plasma nades (PC edition) as a smoke screen..... i can still see em cause i turn particles off (fastest game running)

[Dwarden]

what about airplane (jet) unit trails ? i didn't noticed that ...

[AF]

hhmmm it's been ages since I saw a video with aircraft, I think they where in there but someone else will verify that

[aGorm]

I jsut checked not any that i can see, unles ther hit and smoking... Having vapor trails would rock... you could see the planes manovors, plus it would give you a better judge of where they are...

but not ones that hang around forever as that would take up way to much PC power

aGorm

[AF]

And it would eb unrealistic, they should get larger and more transparent as time goes on untill they dissapear completely.

[WillRiker]

the particles u c for missles (the trails) doing seem to take up too much cpu time, iam sure he can implement it for dust and air trails (which btw could look very cool, check out a performace flight by a SU-37 for the best illustration of that). foot prints/tracks would be quite cool too.

[AF]

Actually the footprints is covered in another thread

[aGorm]

The trailes for the missiles only hang around for about 3 secs maxs, the vapour traile on a plane (if semi-realistic) would stay around for a few minuets slowly disapteing and as they all cross over thered be a lot of alpha blending, which as i understand realy hits slow computers... Even alpha blending in flash can slow down a fast comp, becasue if you have loads of semi transparent things it has to keep adjutsing the coloure for that pixle.

Hence youd have to have compleatly no realsitic ones that just hang about for 5 secs or so... and even that would hit a slow comp.

aGorm

[WillRiker]

but thats why you have settings...

[aGorm]

Yes but there's no point puitting in a feature that no one can use. IF I go on a realy poorly made flash web site for instance, that use tones of alpha fades and blurs etc.. then my computer, bearing in mind its a very fast machine, will still slow down. Having the realistic ones would be cool, but would just strain todays machines to much. Im all for white vapor trails behind the aircraft but they can't hang around any longer than a missiles trail would. (Take into acount in an air battle there would be say 50 planes on both sides, so that 100 trailes on screen, each one criss crossing with a lot of other trails, = loads of alpha blending calulations for each trail, which means massive slow down... plus as you zoomed out your view would get obscured buy the large num of trails...)

Of course you can have them in as an option, that is infact one of the things im always trying to drive into people, i say look, we can just have it as an option of those that would like it. But ther'd be no point in an option that no-one could turn on or ever use. It would be a wast of programing time. Thats all I was saying.

aDoor

[WillRiker]

trust me there particle system will not slow down ur comp.

[AF]

On the contrary, I think that tho for what you might think as normal planes in TA, you do failt o realise that soem fo us are churning out 10 aircraft ever 5 seconds and sending in hundreds upon hundreds of aricraft to their deaths, possibly thousands for some players in an entire game

[WillRiker]

trails only need to stay there for few seconds, CnC generals style

[zwzsg]

Last game I played, my computer would slow down to almost a frozen state whenever there was a smoke trail, so please no smoke trail. And if you do make smoke trail, make a case that I can tick to deactivate them.

[Doomweaver]

First of all, flash sucks. You cannot bring that into the conversation when talking about speed. I don't know why they made it so damned inefficient, but they did.

Now, the way I see it, maybe you don't, actually I don't, but some people do have 4gig computers with two big $1000 video cards plugged into them, and these people cannot get their moneys worth out of hot computers unless we give them a hot game.

Personally, I expect with a GeForce 4 MX 440 or whatever I've got i'm gong to have to turn off particles completely. (And I bet you the water won't work, I just bet you...)

But we still need the feature. Its just so easy to implement, and would look so good on a good computer. (O, and I might add that turning off the shadows for smoke particles will give you a huge speed up)

Plus, If we want to promote spring, we need the screenshots rendered with amazing graphics, because stills never look as good as the real thing.

(and they need a computer with lots more AA than the one currently used, imo, but that's another story.)

[Dwarden]

quite sure Radeon 9700 and up are enough to run all this eye candy w/o perf hit ...

[WillRiker]

tell the res down

[smoth]

particle systems are nice but they are SOOOOOOOOO 1990s. Ribbon effects rock the house and that would be tight as hell on the wing tips of the aircraft :)