Alien swarm particle rendering broken?

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Alien swarm particle rendering broken?

Postby Jangalomph on Thu Jan 10, 2013 3:12 pm

This is more so directed towards Mr2videocards as he is one of the only ones who may know what the problem is.

I have a few problems with particles in alien swarm that I do not have in source 2007.

First off, any normal mapped particle material to create refraction is black if it is merging with a brush such as water, or the floor. "for dripping purposes". So the particles turn black and refuse to refract any thing.

Then having particles lit by the surrounding light is another problem, because in dark places the fog/mist over water is full bright when it should be darken'd because there is no light hitting it, and the parts that are in the light of the tunnel should be tinted by that light like in source 2007. But this doesn't happen, even when my materials are the exact same.

Then, render_models will not work on any particle in game. I have a collapsing ceiling that needs small rocks falling and colliding with the ground, and they refuse to spawn in game.

I believe valve has completely corrupted the particle editor in alienswarm, and its really not fair that I dont have all the initializers and operators that they do, they're able to create vast effects that I cant because I don't have the proper tools to do so.

So if any one knows what the problem is with so many broken rendering problems in ASW, then please tell me.
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Re: Alien swarm particle rendering broken?

Postby WhiteDevil on Fri Jan 11, 2013 10:36 am

Refraction shader is an issue in every source engine version. It works fine with water since it's drawn differently than other shaders but on a normal texture it always causes some rendering problems that can only be the cause of source being fucking old.
Never mix refraction and particles or you're going to have a bad time.
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Re: Alien swarm particle rendering broken?

Postby MrTwoVideoCards on Tue Jan 22, 2013 2:25 pm

WhiteDevil wrote:Refraction shader is an issue in every source engine version. It works fine with water since it's drawn differently than other shaders but on a normal texture it always causes some rendering problems that can only be the cause of source being fucking old.
Never mix refraction and particles or you're going to have a bad time.


Wat. I've never had an issue with refraction. It works exactly the same. In fact it doesn't even use a separate shader. Water uses a completely different rt for refraction and reflection.

Anyways me and Jang had a chat about theses issues. When it comes to the whole refraction thing that shouldn't be happening. There's this newt vmt command for refraction that portal 2 has, I don't know if it's causing any issues. However refraction works fine for me on asw. Make sure that you color the particles pure white, and set alpha high. You can probably try using a refractionmask or whatever it was again to see if that will help. It will probably allow you to at least gauge pixel brightness and make sure it isn't portal 2 being gay for sure.

On the note about particles from lights. It worked okay in asw, but I haven't tested it in a super long ass time. I am pretty sure it's terrible though. Light's don't exist at run time so I am fairly sure valve uses some particle trace method to get a light color. i.e they probably trace straight down or something. If the water is not colored (which it's not) the lightmap data probably shows up as black. That could be why it's not getting colored by the lights.

You're better off manually doing it. It might be a pain given how many unique locations you have particles sitting near lights, but it was the method I used on c17 most of the time and it worked well enough.

On rendering models I have no clue why that doesn't work. Maybe it's actually for reals broken though. I've just tested it and it works fine in asw. I'm just spawning error models to test.
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