Effects in the editor…

We haven’t had much time lately, been too tired after work to be productive.

Anyway, we’ve added effect instancing to the editor… It’s still not complete, but although the effects have to be authored “by hand” in XML, we can now create and use them in the editor:

That’s the frost bones effect, which is basically a particle system that spawns particles on the bones of the attached object and makes them slowly fall down. The idea is to use this for one of the early enemies (that doesn’t have a name yet, “Frost Touch” is the main candidate), which leaves a debuff on the creature he hits with his melee swipes. That debuff slows down the attack speed of those afflicted.

Anyway, programmers shouldn’t be allowed near particle systems in no situation… They start playing around and do stuff like:

Flame-head!

The test there was to see if the particle system scaled correctly with the object, which it does… It only scales the visual components, so when you increase (or decrease) the size of the attached object too much, it start being weird, because the particle speeds aren’t affected by the size. For example, if I increase the size of the skeleton to 10 times as large, the “hair” will seem to be smaller, because the particles won’t move up as fast as necessary for the effect to stay the same (relatively speaking).

Anyway, if that situation arises, it’s better to author a different effect altogether, since the amount of particles and other parameters might need some changes as well…

This part of the editor isn’t still completely done (I want to add some parameter changing, and the thumbnails for the effects aren’t right), but it’s close enough so I have it done next week and can start moving towards other systems…