AFX Selectrons and Other Goodies

My previous blog entries covering Arcane-FX development have mostly been about spellcasting effects. For this blog, I'm going to set aside magic effects for a bit and present some other kinds of special effects and special effects tools we've been developing for AFX.

When we first started development on Arcane-FX, we were not thinking much beyond spellcasting and other magic effects. It was the early days of World of Warcraft, and the whole notion of AFX grew out of a determination to recreate, in TGE, the kind of spell effects I was seeing in WoW. However, once we got the first few AFX spells working, it was clear that the same mechanisms we had developed for crafting magic effects could also be used for other kinds of special effects. Now, we finally have some concrete examples.

Selectrons

It's understandable if you don't know what a selectron is, since it's a word we made up. Selectrons are what we call the effects used to indicate that a scene object is selected. They are usually used for picking a target of some kind. The target of a spell, the target of a conversation, etc.

Selectron effects were not something we planned for. We just suddenly discovered that we needed a way to make them. AFX target selections were originally a simple red circle projected on the ground below a character. It was static and fairly hardcoded.


One day Matt asked if we could make the red circle glow briefly when first selected so that it would reflect the behavior of the casting zodiacs in many of his spell designs. I spent about 10 minutes thinking about a quick and dirty way to add an animated glow to the selection circle, before I realized that what we really needed was a way to create selection effects that was parallel to the way we created spellcasting effects.

In AFX, special effects are organized using an effects choreographer. The choreographer used for spellcasting is called afxMagicSpell. To create dynamic selection effects, we made a new choreographer called afxSelectron. It's a bit simpler than afxMagicSpell, but it generally works much the same way, and this really opens the doors to designing some very interesting selection effects. And unlike spellcasting effects, you usually want selectrons to execute only on the client used by the player actually making the selection. afxSelectron takes care of this.


Well, what can you do with a selectron? If you prefer to show a selection using a texture below the selected object, you can do that with zodiacs. They can be layered and animated creating something much more dynamic than a static circle. If you prefer to show selections with some kind of geometry hovering above the selected object, that's easy too. Attaching separate sound effects for object selection and deselection is trivial. The selection effects in WoW are pretty simple, a colored circle beneath the selected character. But if you look closely, you'll notice that the selections are not really circles but somewhat crescent-like, and very subtly, the fat part of the crescent always points toward the camera. This camera tracking is easily reproduce in AFX by aim constraining a zodiac to the camera. Here are some stills of some example selectrons we've created.


The selectrons shown in the pics are dynamic, so you may get a better impression of this viewing the Selectrons movie here. Also, the movie is silent, but our default AFX selectron has separate sound effects for the select and deselect actions.

Sci-Fi Effects

Our results here are still rather preliminary, but we have started experimentally applying AFX to the realm of sci-fi and other futuristic effects. Matt's first creation is a spell-like effect that materializes a small personal attack satellite that orbits the player, executes a deadly laser attack, and then dematerializes. A nice aspect of the effect is the way that the hovering drone appears to kick up dust clouds as it moves over the ground. We think there's room for improvement in the lasers and would like to explore development of a special energy beam type projectile.


Beyond the satellite effect, there are a few details about the space helmet that are worth mentioning. In the AFX demo, when you go to the spellbank containing the satellite effect, the demo enters a simple Sci-Fi mode. It switches the targeting selectron to a sci-fi style and adds a space helmet to the player's orc. The space helmet is not part of the orc model and it is not added using the mount mechanism. The helmet is an afxModel effect and it is constrained to the orc's head using an Effectron. Effectron is the name we give to a simple one-stage choreographer that is very useful for simple effects groupings. Here it's used to add some special gear to the player character. Effectrons are also useful for adding effects to a freshly dropped item, to an unlooted corpse, or for subtle environment effects. They are also potentially useful for melee effects, and weapon embellishments.


For more, visit arcane-FX.com.