Yesterday I made several improvements to the flame particle system. It was an interesting problem. I wanted randomness, but not too much. Also I didn't want to do collision on them to avoid the runtime cost, so I wanted to flame particles to stay within their trigger box ( or nearly so ).

What I did was to start the flames at a random location within the box, but effectively converted to a cylinder. I chose a random location in [-1,-1,-1]..[1,1,1], then added 1.0 to y, then normalized the resulting vector. This makes the distribution round instead of square, and concentrates more particles near the origin than at the edges. Then I scaled the x & z by the trigger box width & depth, then just took the abs of the original y value * the box height, to get the final position.

Next I changed the per-particle code to add a random displacement to its velocity every frame, apply the velocity to the position, then look to see of the particle has left the box. If so, I mark it for death, and then stop updating its velocity and fade it out over 300 msecs. I also do a fade as the particles reach the top of the box, multiplying the two fade factors together and using this as the particle alpha.

In the pixel shader, I additionally fade based on the fog factor, so the flames look correct in the distance.



Once I had it working well, I put some more flames in the various levels, and it really helps the look & immersion factor, when I added a sound source and light flicker to the effect. Of course, this was a pain to track 3 separate objects - the trigger, sound, and light in the editor, so I decided to partly automate it.

I made the engine look for facets on the trigger box for sound info as well as for light parameters, and put some useful defaults in for the flame case ( like the light will flicker by default, etc. ). So, now all the designer must do is create the trigger and give it 4-5 facets to get the effect. I also added a volume facet to a sound source, which was inexplicably not handled before.

This made it easier, but was still overly complicated, so at the level designer's request, I put in Cut, Copy & Paste into the level editor. It doesn't work for static world triangles, but only for editor objects, like meshes, triggers, entities, sound, lights, etc.

Took a while to get it all sorted out, compiling and working, but now I'm glad I did it - it will be a huge time saver, and much more generally useful than making separate macro butters for 'torch', etc., which was my previous idea.

Here is a shot of the crypt level with several torches visible. Note how the torch at the middle top of the shot is almost faded out in the fog.