Spring RTS Engine

I really love the default explosions, BA/BAR uses them heavily. But on some cases, the number of particles spawned is a tad high. Just wondering if anyone had a converter that exported default explosions to a CEG (for maybe just a given damage/AOE parameter).

The default explosions are awful...

I can't believe this is even a thread... That said, creating CEGs similar to the default explosions would be easy and a total snoozefest.

Default explosions use TONS of particles, and yes, I do mean tons. Play with /debug on sometime and feel the particle haet.

What you need is a small ceg explosion that replicates an engine explosion, but where you can just copy and paste it and play with numbers till you get what you want (so you can do this for every size of explosion). Would be easy enough.

Pretty much. Do you happen to have such a ceg file?

Bleh. No, but I suppose I can make one for you. I have no idea what the default explosions look like though. I do know that the engine loves spawning hundreds of particles for trivial blasts. That's always fun. I suppose I can grab BA and have a look.

If you're thinking of using ANY default explosions in BAR, I'll disown you.

Hang on a bit, I'll see what I can cook up for ya.

Ok here you go:

http://pastebin.com/sciJiNbC

Some things to note...

This is scaled ~ to the size of what a proper explosion for the shell of a raider or stumpy shell would be, so when adjusting, keep that in mind.

On the surface this looks like it uses a lot of particles, which technically, it does, however, they die incredibly quickly. In this way, you can actually get away with a lot of particle use without hurting performance (because they die nearly immediately after they get spawned).

Here is how to modify it... more or less "properly":

Outerflash:
This is the texture that gets big in the background. This is a really subtle effect that gives the pretense of a "shockwave". It starts out as extremely tiny and gets large then disappears very quickly.

You can adjust this easily by simply editing the "sizegrowth" parameter.

IF absolutely necessary, you can edit the size parameter, but when you do that you are changing the size that the texture starts out as, so changing "size" may look pretty strange.

Centerflare:
This is part of the heat of the explosion. You probably won't ever need to change this, but if you do, change the "sizegrowth" parameter.

Orangeexplosionspikes:
These are the little ehh... sparks that shoot out when the shell explodes (you'll see what I mean). For this item, leave the sizing and growth alone, and adjust "sizemod" (decimal point changes in sizemod are exponential (to some degree... I'm just saying, a tiny bit goes a very long ways)!).

Kickedupdirt:
This is probably the one you'll want to adjust the most. THere are a ton of customizations that can be made here. At the moment it is colormapped to resemble dirt, which you can easily adjust the map to look like smoke, or whatever you like.

In order to size this for various explosions you'll need to fiddle with various values.
sizegrowth will adjust how large it gets over the particle's lifetime. You're probably better off messing with particlesize than sizegrowth.

In order to make it simple, we'll just say that particlelifespread adjusts how long the smoke/dirt/whatever rises.

particleSpeedSpread adjusts how fast the particles spread out from the center of the explosion.

particlelife adjust how long the particle lives. You prolly won't want to change this, but you can play around with it to adjust things. Beware though that the longer the particles live, the fewer particles you should be using.

That should cover the most important parts I think. Play around with it. You could also add more stuff to it, like dirt chunks flying around, etc.

This isn't a 1:1 recreation of the default explosions as the engine just spawns a bunch of particles in the center of the explosion which z-fight each other to the death.

The relevant textures are here:

https://evolutionrts.googlecode.com/svn ... aexplo.tga

https://evolutionrts.googlecode.com/svn ... /flare.tga

https://evolutionrts.googlecode.com/svn ... hside2.tga

https://evolutionrts.googlecode.com/svn ... osmoke.tga

Super thanks man, ill test them out when I get to the explosions stage:)

Ok, I have done a lot more work on this, and they are much more completed here...

These are the generic shell explosions I am now using in evo, and I use these to base my new explosions off of. These should provide pretty much all the groundwork you will need to make tons of excellent explosion effects.

The file is commented with the relevant bits:
https://code.google.com/p/evolutionrts/ ... losion.tdf

Make sure to grab the needed textures! I think the only one that isn't listed above is wake.tga.

Oh, I should mention that these are properly adjusted for air water and ground.

I will no doubt be making these even better and better, so feel free to keep checking back on this file.