Interlopers.net Forum - Half-Life 2 News & Tutorials

Yeah, UE4 and frostbite 2 could handle "fluid" particles to some degree. I've been working on a shader for fluid particles. But it'll take me a long time to make it work.

Just some collision tests in UDK using the collision module. Pretty nifty! Supposed to replicated molten slag.

Nice looking effect. Now does that collision work on a real time basis or do you just have it as a one way effect?

100% real time, it collides with any thing it touches, and reacts accordingly. It'll reflect off any surface and bounce the way its supposed to.

who wants to sit there throwing hot magma at walls all day though?

nice effect.

joe_rogers_11155 wrote:who wants to sit there throwing hot magma at walls all day though?

If it looks like that I would.

No but heres its practical use.

Very nice Janga, what's the overhead on that? Expensive to run? The first video reminds me of the particles that bounce out of the portal gun shot when you hit a non-portalable wall.

I don't think this is too expensive really, I run something similar to it in no more room in hell with fairly minimal performance as long as it isn't spammed. With these sparks, i'd assume its much more performance friendly in UDK since it's multi-core support and nmrih isn't. I guess i'll see how expensive it is in game in a real environment when the time comes. But i feel that its pretty cheap.



Like that runs flawlessly.

I don't get along well with the Source Particle Editor, how flexible is the UDK one?
It looks pretty awesome.

UDK one is far better. So much more you can do. At first it feels like UDK doesn't have as much control over particles. But once you learn the curve editor its far more powerful. Not to mention the material systems are amazing. Try it, and convert like me

Explosion in UDK, white spheres are just place holders for debris.

I don't know why but your particle effects always seem to leave me with wanting more.
Not to underplay your hard work, it just seems to be lacking in something.

I guess with the explosion it just lacks the full-bodyness of a good movie style explosion.
Depending on the use I think more thick smoke and prominent flames on detonation , but real world explosions depend on the material and location.
I don't even know the limitations of the udk particle editor though, so maybe I'm just used to looking at too many pre-rendered particle effects.

It's the speed. There's a build-up where there shouldn't be - some of the best grenade particles I've ever seen were in Killzones 1 and 2. It was an instant FWUMP, with a super-short, deep, dirty orange flash hidden by some really thick smoke that lingered for some time. Yours currently looks like a very small nuke sped up, not a conventional detonation. Get some really thick, dark smoke in there.

Try to contain the explosions more, Janga - less 'bang', more 'fwump'.

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.