I understand what you guys mean, but allow me to elaborate a tad. Let me go by saying i wish i could get the quality effects of a pre-rendered explosion in real time, but i cant... Yet, i'm working on a shader to allow me to do it. In the mean time I just cant do it, i dont have the tech. Another thing, the smoke is darker and more "high quality" than it appears in the video as my recorder sucks, and youtube compresses the hell out of it.
What It really looks like:
The Nitty Gritty:
You can't have super gorgeous ultra thick black smoke (you can, but not alot of it) in a multi-player game due to the fact that if 20 people detonate an explosion at the same time, the lag would be so unbearable the servers would probably crash if players were standing in it. The GPU can't handle so much overdraw and opaqueness of particles. Some times even one explosion if you're standing in it could drop your fps by a ton. This is just the quirks of the sprite system and the way the GPU handles things as far as i know. I do agree that the best explosions for grenades are nearly instant.
I do find that most of my particles (mainly explosions) lack in speed as they're either too drawn out, or not drawn out enough. The timing is often off and I can never seem to pinpoint why or how. It's just difficult to time a particle correctly as there are so many emitters doing totally different things. I will try to make a version showcasing more FWUMP and less "bang".
Unreal engine 4, and Frostbite 3 can handle real time simulated/pre-rendered effects as you guys would ask for. Its just in the technology.
I'll work on timing, and post it.
As for that shader i talked about:
Ugly: yes. Is the idea there? you bet.