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Creavion wrote:Would be interesting when I could pimp my next projects up with your stuff!

u made me curious,what kind of new project ,and great job on the beam emitter btw

A three sp-map campagin. (with story)

Creavion wrote:A three sp-map campagin. (with story)

any details yet ? ^^ curious about how you want to use the features..

I hate to talk about something what has not been started yet (time reasons).

i just realize,botpack from ut has been converted for unreal 1,means we can play ut99 mods in unreal,but we cant play mods in unreal based on the SDK,unless u make a conversion for U1,wich is highly unlikely

Why is it highly unlikely ? I'm planning it..

well i thought u wouldnt cuz the engine in UT is slightly different then the one in Unreal,and i thought u added things based on botpack <--reason why i thought it only was for UT,but if u can port it to unreal,then that would be awsome

yes that's true, UT's Unreal Engine is 1.5 - Build 436 (or whatsoever, speaking of the messy Build 452 Community Patch), Unreal's Unreal Engine is 1.0 - Build 227f (using the OldUnreal Community Beta Patch Build 227f) - with the 227f Patch Unreal got many features UT had first (Decals for example, or better Netcode) and beyond (updated UnrealED from 2.0 to 2.1), other than that the SDK uses the Botpack Package only for some Weapons and Pawn Classes, a port shouldn't be that difficult.

Speaking of other UE 1.x Games like Deus Ex or Wheel of Time (WoT) it's more difficult (WoT's Editor is a complete mess..), a different factor is the popularity and how much active the community of the other games are (in that case: Deus Ex 1 > WoT).

JOURNAL DATE: 13.01.2010

CHANGES / UPDATES

• Weather Emitter System finished (Rain, Snow, Dust, Wind, Cloud Emitters)
• Sprite Beam Emitter finished (For drawing Light Rays, Light Beams, some Type of Lasers)
• Corona Emitter finished
• New Sprites finished (Sprites with indipendent Axis, Orientation and Smooth Scaling/Fading)
• currently working on LAST 2 Emitter Types: Spark and Trail Emitters
• currently working on on Realtime Menu-Editor for all Emitter Types (kinda difficult..)

OVERVIEWS


New Sprites

The user now has to ability to place Sprites with highly editable Orientation Options.
Sprites now orient indipently to all 3 Axis (X,Y,Z) and not all at the same time (still possible though).
In addition they now smoothly fade and scale and have standard Animation Support.
They can be used as single actors or as Particles.


Weather System

The Weather System finally has been finished.
The User is now able to draw Rain, Snow, Dust / Wind ("Stormy Sprites") AND Clouds in a Map.
In General the Weather Emitters are limitted Sprite Emitters with less Options.
All Types of Weather Emitters can be affacted by Wind Force Actors to simulate Wind and Storm.
Like the Sprite Emitter the Weather Emitters may (slowly) spin their Sprites, for example good for Snow Flakes or Clouds.

To save performance I'm currently testing and implementing a Particle Recycle System. "New" Particle aren't spawned, there're replaced to initial settings and position. Other than that there're over 20 Performance Settings by Standard...


Sprite Beam Emitter

Draw Particles connected together as a Beam, other than the normal Beam Emitter this one draws chained Sprites, which is possibly very effective for rendering Light Beams. The Sprites of this Emitter can be spinned and freely orientated to what ever you like (player, offset, some other location, a tagged actor etc.) and have indipendent Axis too.


Corona Emitter

Just like the Sprite Emitter, but draws multiple Coronas instead. Could be useful for some effects.
The Coronas support Instant-Culling and Fade-Culling AND also all already described Features of the new Sprites.



MEDIA

[youtube]s-_dXUv__1k[/youtube]

2 Sprites, both spinning slowly, one is a Z-Axis Sprite (which means it only orients around Z-Axis), the other uses all Axis.















Note: All used textures are NOT higher than 256x256 Pixels

The Cloud looks and behaves totally volumetric, through a subtle spin of the Cloud Textures no one even realises it's just Sprites...

Shadow wrote:Weather System

Holy wow!! i m already a fan of yours Shadow!!

Looks cool indeed and .. even if I am not normally one of them who would ask this: What about the performance there?
Well the textures are not a big problem, but afaik the many sprites can cause big lacks.
Anyway but you know that Dots has converted this native coded Wheater system for ut? (ok without those cool sprite-clouds^^)

thats nicely done

about performance, well, new update of old game should aim for new pc's not old pc's.

Tz, ... thats an engine problem. A huge mass of sprites can cause really big lacks (afaik). And actually this question was for Shadow...?!
At least my big jungle map has at some place a shit performance .. the meshes. It does not matter what pc you have (since the engine can work with only one core anyway). Newer pcs have sometimes even more problems with that than older ones.

Crevion is right, Unreal Engine 1 has a minor "bug" causing engine slowdowns if some sprites (or more) occupy most of the player's screen. Knowing this, I know what and how the Emitters (of course do I) emit Particles. The Cloud Emitter in the picture only used 12-16 Particles. Users won't really recognize that it's made of only a few Sprites, because the new Sprites are technically Mesh-Sheets. Unreal Engine 1 is good in drawing many low-poly Meshes... so 1:0 for me. Second thing is why you don't really see it's Sprites: The new Sprites support different, indipendent Axis Orientation and Spinning, giving the Illusion of many different Sprites, while the texture Array might only use 1-8 Textures at all ! And I still keep in mind that there're also users with older Hardware. The SDK will (or already has) have many Performance Settings, so this is one of the things I don't really worry about.

Well I heard off Dots' Native Emitters but didn't know that he had a Native Weather System. I will offer Native and non-Native Particle Systems, giving the possibility of Crossplatform-Compatibility AND hardware-accelerated Performance.

Win