AFX: Off to a Great Start

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Todd Pickens   (Dec 18, 2006 at 18:07 GMT)

Jeff,

Congrats and best of luck with it!

Dave Young   (Dec 18, 2006 at 18:23 GMT)

I'll echo again my many glowing reviews of this product: to see it in action breathes a whole new life into the TGE technology and immediately unblocks some of those hindrances to making your dream game. When you look into the technology underneath you see a lot more than you were expecting - in a good way.

And the documentation is outstanding. If you're making a TGE game, you need this product now!

Wiley   (Dec 18, 2006 at 18:47 GMT)

The product is excellent and was well documented. You keep creating products like this and I'll be there to buy it on release day each and every time. Outstanding product. Kudos to you.

If you are still thinking of purchasing this product, don't wait. It is definitely without a doubt worth it.

Tony Richards   (Dec 18, 2006 at 19:36 GMT)

Great effects... keep 'em coming! :P

Congrats on your great debut. You guys have an incredible product and you deserve a great success.

Jonathon Stevens   (Dec 18, 2006 at 20:12 GMT)   Resource Rating: 5

Congrats again Jeff! Just an afterthought which might already be in the engine, but I don't remember seeing it: Have you guys thought about checking the 'coloring' or 'texture' of the ground and doing spells which can "interact" with it?

That was a horrible description of what I mean, so let me give an example:

You are in the desert and you cast a spell called tornado. Tornado erupts from the ground and is the same color as the sand and looks like it's actually picking up the sand into the tornado. Now, you are in a grassy area. Cast Tornado again and now it's a green 'grass-filled' tornado.

Get my drift?

Jeff Faust   (Dec 18, 2006 at 20:57 GMT)

@ Jonathon Stevens -- I know exactly what you are talking about. In CoreTech, the sci-fi effect Occam's Laser (pictured at the bottom of this blog entry) features a little flying drone that appears to kick up dust from the ground. We thought about keying the appearance of the dust to the underlying terrain, but never quite got around to trying it. But, if the number of different possibilites are small and you can come up with a script callable function to test the ground characteristics, you should be able to make it work now using a conditional execution mask. Some effects are turned on over grass, but ignored over sand, etc. The current limitation is that the effect would need to commit to its ground-selected charateristics at the beginning and throughout the life of the effect. Dynamically changing the characteristics as the tornado, or drone, or whatever passes over varying terrain would be much more difficult and would currently require a large amount of code customization.

Joshua Dallman   (Dec 18, 2006 at 21:02 GMT)

This is definitely one of the hot most-talked-about products around the Garage. Congrats on the great start and cheers to future expansions.

Link to AFX Product

Dave Young   (Dec 18, 2006 at 21:11 GMT)

There is a pretty simple way to grab the property map from the ground texture, its used for sounds, etc. in Player...You can easily add new fields to the property map and use them in effect calculations.

Jonathon Stevens   (Dec 18, 2006 at 21:13 GMT)   Resource Rating: 5

@Jeff - What about non-dynamically changing throughout the life? Sometimes it's not realistic, but in the case of a Tornado spell, all tornados get darker the more they 'feed' so no matter what terrain you went on, it would end up dark and pretty much cover all terrains with realism.


Edited on Dec 18, 2006 21:13 GMT

Jeff Faust   (Dec 18, 2006 at 21:46 GMT)

@ Jonathon Stevens -- You could mix terrain-specific conditional effects and other, always-on effects to create a tornado that appeared to arise out of dust, or grass, or leaves depending on where it started, then gradually filled out into a denser, more generic appearance that seemed believable over any terrain it wandered over. Then you could also recheck the terrain type at impact time and your impact and dissipation effects could also take on qualities of the terrain at that location. I can imagine characters chased by a tornado running to whatever terrain location that produces minimal damage from the tornado impact.

Kenneth Holst   (Dec 18, 2006 at 21:55 GMT)

Awesome Jeff! I've really enjoyed playing around with the beta and wish you a lot of success!

Jonathon Stevens   (Dec 18, 2006 at 22:03 GMT)   Resource Rating: 5

@Jeff - OK. Sounds great. Now, make it happen and add in dts/diff effects so the tornado can take out buildings and trees ;)

Allyn "Mr_Bloodworth" Mcelrath   (Dec 18, 2006 at 23:49 GMT)

Now, if it just had an editor.


Great work man, nice job.

Michael Perry   (Dec 19, 2006 at 13:13 GMT)

Congrats on the launch of this amazing product. I can't wait to get out of work and continue my usage of AFX.

Edward   (Dec 23, 2006 at 15:49 GMT)

awesome product, defintly a new standard. i would almost go so far as saying this is almost a 1.6 TGE. The AFX pack will definitly make heads turn once they see some of the useful items it has to offer.

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