Air Ace Clouds!
by Thomas \"Man of Ice\" Lund · 03/26/2006 (2:41 am) · 23 comments
Ahhhh
Yesterday I was playing Heroes of the Pacific for inspiration, and noticed how much clouds mean in an air combat game.
So what better than to sit down and code a cloud renderer object for Air Ace?
(The observant reader would already now guess that I succeded - why else post a new blog) :-)
So without much further talk here are some screenies!!
One of the first attempts where "something" appeared on screen
Now it can scale the cloud puff billboards
And finally a nicer texture and something that actually looks like a cloud!!
But screenshots dont make this any justice.
Check out a little movie I made. 2 large clouds with approx 40 billboards in each of them.
Movie link (~7 MB)
Single cloud movie - fluffy fluffy
Movie link (~2 MB)
The clouds are very network efficient (single position for the entire cloud combined with a random seed + info on sizes of cloud+puffs).
I'm still fighting with getting texture lighting modified, so that the puffs on the underside are darker than the ones towards the sun. The code is in, but changing color has no effect for some reason.
Still room for improvement, but it looks damn cool!
Yesterday I was playing Heroes of the Pacific for inspiration, and noticed how much clouds mean in an air combat game.
So what better than to sit down and code a cloud renderer object for Air Ace?
(The observant reader would already now guess that I succeded - why else post a new blog) :-)
So without much further talk here are some screenies!!
One of the first attempts where "something" appeared on screen
Now it can scale the cloud puff billboards
And finally a nicer texture and something that actually looks like a cloud!!
But screenshots dont make this any justice.
Check out a little movie I made. 2 large clouds with approx 40 billboards in each of them.
Movie link (~7 MB)
Single cloud movie - fluffy fluffy
Movie link (~2 MB)
The clouds are very network efficient (single position for the entire cloud combined with a random seed + info on sizes of cloud+puffs).
I'm still fighting with getting texture lighting modified, so that the puffs on the underside are darker than the ones towards the sun. The code is in, but changing color has no effect for some reason.
Still room for improvement, but it looks damn cool!
#22
Just a stab in the dark
03/27/2006 (12:34 pm)
Welp, I am not a coder, as if that wasn't obvious, but my guess would be that if you removed the "alpha cutoff stuff", then it is probably rendering based on a default parameter in the engine code, which may not be the setting you need to get what you want.Just a stab in the dark
#23
06/26/2007 (5:21 am)
Beautiful! 
Torque Owner Josh Moore