[burn0ut]

damn u guys have some leet cards, i play wit a viper550 and 300mhz i get like 50 60fps SOWNED#@!!!!!!!!!!

[shahar2k]

Burnout, I'll be paying for this computer for the next two years, heh I've been saving up for it for at least twice as long... trust me, it won't be so 133T when I'm done with it....

Barker, play the full version of Alien Vs Predator, it had the kind of explosions you were talking about, they were butt ugly if you were cought in one but to see a fireball burst from around the corner and spill into the hallway... DAMN

wouldn't that same effect be possible by spewing out explosion "particles" from the source and having them conform to physics, and leave a fire trail? kinda like Grenades in the Quake series??

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Maybe I'm paranoid... maybe it's you!

[Freddio]

geeks

All of you

[Frost]

Video cards suck cause they can only render triangles, lines and points. Voxels suck even more, although they have their uses and are sometimes the only good way of doing very specific things. Until we get raytracing in real-time, forget it. Surface approximation for curves, displacement maps, etc will for a long time coming still be performed at a polygon level for representation. Don't expect miracles any time soon.

(take into consideration that I work at a 3D graphics chip company...=)

[Ben Barker]

Yeah, but give the particles volume (metaballs) and use that volume to create the fire.
Shit, it takes my p3 650 15 minutes to do one frame like that in 3D Studio. So it's going to be a while before the average gamer can do it 30 times a second.

Particles are pretty amazing though. I was watching the Blizzard Diablo 2 Expansion cinematic, and there was this part where almost everything was particles. I mean, everything.
There was particle snow falling, particle smoke, instanced bird models on particles in the background, and a running army made of instanced geometry on particles. Plus there was cloth everywhere, and cloth calculation plug-ins treat vertices like particles. Counting the cloth, there must have been 30 particle emitters.

Hmm, I played AvP a little bit, but I don't remember that. Maybe because I just played the Alien all the time.


[edit]


This is what I'm talking about. The arrows don't point to the cloth, which is just everywhere. I think I missed some smoke emitters too. And the army might be more than two emitters, I'm not sure how many it is.

[This message has been edited by Ben Barker (edited December 31, 2000).]

[shahar2k]

frost, I agree that ray tracing is the way to go, however there's a slight problem, ray tracing will only help with the lighting, however, as graphic power increases, and the ability so show ultracomplex scenes in real time comes in.... well, can you imagine creating the resources for a game that looks in real time the way diablo II cinematics look? seriously, games, do not (personal belief) depend on graphics, unless the graphics have a purpose, if you want to put in 10,000 poly per particle snowflake, each one unique, there had better be a damn good reason to put it in, other than "it looks cool"
just look at Metal Gear solid 2, it may look cool, but nearly everything was put in for gameplay purposes, where they could have put the polycount per charecter about 5 times what they did, they took that and made real time shadowing, reflections, and amazing particle effects which change the gameplay (they DO have explosions that go down hallways, and they have that steam that shoots out of pipes that actually burns people near it, nothing in that game is pure fluff, well, almost nothing)
so I say, lets make some damn good physics accelerators, and AI developments before we have a 10 milion polygon grunt running into a wall due to bad pathfinding.

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Maybe I'm paranoid... maybe it's you!

[shahar2k]

oh and the actual term geek I believe refers to somone who eats live animals in a circus freakshow...

[Freddio]

yuk..

[dorfie]

just to add a insignificant piece of info, the army in the D2X cinematic isn't instanced particles, they're regular models controlled by a maxscript...

[Ben Barker]

Are you sure? There are several guys in the army with weird motion indicitave of particles.
Man, I wonder what that MAXscript looks like.
Any idea how that might work?

[Flexible Elf]

Anybody play any Rocket Arena here?

-Flexible Elf

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http://www.geocities.com/flexible_elf/Main.html

[Scorchmon]

Rocket Arena 3 is what's been taking up my time recently.

[faustgfx]

ben parker:

on create_wscl pressed do (
in DCC_facade.current (
wsclod = execute "$ws_compositelod*"
if (wsclod.count > 0) do (
delete wsclod
)

for example. just a random copy/paste. that's a copyrighted bit, though.


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sky high with a heartache of stone you never see me 'cos i'm always alone/ministry
the law of lead now reigns!@#!/earth crisis

[email protected]
icq#35983387
http://faustgfx.0wns.org

[This message has been edited by faustgfx (edited January 03, 2001).]

[shahar2k]

oooh maxscript... how I wish I knew ye
fingers are hurting from the fear thread,
I just wondered if anyone's played No one lives forever, and could you please tell me what in the hell would cause the lighting in the lithtech engine to have that persistently gaudy look? like somone took a 4 bit dithered gif and called it a light map....
the rest of the game is decidedly gorgeous although I would have added more bones to the face, and some random motions, as their mouths look a bit awkward for those beutifull models.

only past the first level now,
do you want to buy a monkey?


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Maybe I'm paranoid... maybe it's you!

[dorfie]

yep i'm sure...they had it written before any of the cool new charstudio3 crowd stuff was out. (which is why they had to write it)

the reason they can't use instanced particles is because if you just have a particle the guys will not bounce off eachother (well, they will, but won't have the animations for it) and other specialized things...the maxscript also allows for a 'warrior toolkit'...they make x number of bodies, and y number of weapons, etc, and it mixes them up and creates the crowd.

[shahar2k]

anyone here actually FROM blizzard? heh it'd be interesting how much of this is first source info...

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Maybe I'm paranoid... maybe it's you!

[Ben Barker]

quote:

---

Originally posted by dorfie:

the reason they can't use instanced particles is because if you just have a particle the guys will not bounce off eachother (well, they will, but won't have the animations for it) and other specialized things...the maxscript also allows for a 'warrior toolkit'...they make x number of bodies, and y number of weapons, etc, and it mixes them up and creates the crowd.

---

That's pretty sweet. I could pull off pretty much the same thing with particles and a little more work though. Especially when the horde is really far away, like in the War 3 trailer. And the fact that it makes life a lot easier when you have a team of people, but taking the time to write that and do it that way is probably not worth the time for just one person. I might as well move every warrior by hand.
I should learn Maxscript, but it's syntactically it's such a hacked up POS it's pretty hard. There's virtually no naming conventions, there's no syntactic sugar to make your life easier, and the parser blows.

Faustgfx, copyrighting shit like that blows. I hate when people do that. If I wrote something like that it would be on the internet under the GPL the next day.
My drawing teacher put a copyright on his class syllabus. As if it was totally original. It was unbelievable. Where has altruism gone?
There's a difference between intellectual property that should be free and that which should have a copyright. Textbooks, artwork, music obviously, should have some copyrights. But there should never be a blanket copyright on a whole book, especially a textbook. And what does a company have to gain by copyrighting something which, if released, would cause no harm to their sales and would serve a great educational value to the rest of the industry?