Particles

[Feline Witch]

I have seen some great looking particle effects done with AM, and I was rather disapointed when I found out you can't use them in games.

 

Well, could I make particle sprites with AM, and turn them into an effect with some kind of editor? Do you know a good particle editor that will let me do this, and use them in a game?

[KenH]

I don't know that particles in games are realtime. I think they're just alpha images/sprites...but I could be wrong.

[BitShuffler]

Games use many techniques these days that used to be confined to 3d rendering programs because the hardware is starting to be able to support it.

 

It will only be a matter of a few years before hardware will have inbuilt support for high level rendering api's like Renderman or a Micro$oft created equivalent. Pixel shader 2.0, HLSL is a primitive version of that now.

 

So yes many things are now possible. With games it's all about cost though. Particles are calculation intensive and the more complex (read more realistic) systems you have, the more your frame rate suffers. And as they say, Frame rate is life. ;-)

 

So to answer your orignal question FW, what you really need is a kick-@$$ programmer to show a render of your AM created kick-@$$ particles to and then say 'Implement this'.

 

But crawling before you can walk, you have to first ask 'What engine, what genre, what premise, and most importantly, why is my game going to be fun?'.

 

So many people talk about creating games, so few finish them, and an amazingly small percentage of those succeed in creating a game that is actually fun. Most people get tied up with the features, "it's got 'a' or 'b'" without stopping to consider whether those features pull their weight when it comes to gameplay.

 

Good luck with your game. :-)