Polished explosions

Somewhere in the last updates (OpenGL and even before), I spoiled the explosion effect:

Fixing it was relatively easy, but then I noticed that the explosion was missing smoke particles:

Unfortunately, adding smoke particles would require some depth sorting, or else the explosion would loose its brightness, which is not what I wanted…

After mucking around with the factors, adding more particles, etc, I decided to forego the smoke…

The explosion is a very fast effect, the lack of smoke won’t be very apparent unless you’re looking for it… The brightness is more important (we associate brightness with energy and an explosion is all about the energy).

I might revisit this later, if I start missing it very much, but to be honest I don’t believe that will be an actual problem except for me… Order-Independent Transparency would help here, but I can’t do that with the DX9 renderer (might be able to do it with the OpenGL one, though), but it’s cost would narrow the target GPUs…

The explosions look pretty good already, it’s the best explosions I’ve ever made!

Anyway, tweaking effect parameters is a drag, the next step on my game development efforts in the future (after this game is done) is to make a engine-independent effect system with an associated editor (so I can use it for both Cantrip and Spellbook)… It will be a lot of work, but it will pay itself after 10 or 20 effects, and it will improve the effect quality noticeable, I think…

Now listening to “Reflection” by “Paradise Lost”