Weather effects

[ChupaReaper]

Like you've got Fade and Outsidefog in MAPINFO one could add weather effects for indoors and outdoors either have hud graphics moving about the screen or some sort of camera distortion effect (like the warp effect used on textures.) The graphics could be scripted but it would be better if they were in map info. One could also define weather actors in decorate for custom weather effects aswell.

[KeksDose]

You can already have good weather effects via Decorate. You define IE a raindrop actor and a raindrop spawner, and these would be placed in the map. And snow effects are possible, too (but if there are too many snowflakes the game would lag your ass to the 7th dimension lol).

[Enjay]

Some time ago Graf did mention that he had an idea about how to make multi-particle-like actor effects cause less of a slowdown but I don't think anything has come of it.

[KeksDose]

Less slowdown while movement would be bad-@$$ed. Effects like snow wouldn't be laggy anymore then. Actually GZDoom only slowdowns because of moving actors, not rendering them, so if the snow isn't animated while it's on the ground (Why would someone have ANIMATED snow?) it would bring less slowdown. And with this technique for multi-paticleish-like-actors to make them make much less slowdown while moving it would lag even less. Now this would be cool.

[ChupaReaper]

One could do that I suppose, but one of those effects where you see rain running down the camera, blurring it up a bit would be nice.

[ChupaReaper]

One could go boyond weather effects and make effects for different things, like a flame coming from the bottom of the screen when the player is burning and better effects for powerups etc, these'd have to be done with shaders or something because an image would look shit basically! Like using the warp effect on the player's view instead of just a texture, and maybe adding color on top of that. (i don't know adsactly what shaders are, so that might be wrong.)

[KeksDose]

Just do it yourself with good drawings and intelligently used HUD Messages. Is it actually possible to warp *Font Graphics*? This could actually archive effects like fire, if someone is a bit time sparing Or too lazy. But Graf Zahl said sometime that this will not be added (like the "Strife Death Sequences", where the hands are burning), it just eats up too much time, which Zahl doesn't really seem to have =/

Weather effects can be archived very easily by "Particle Spawners" and "HUD Messages". Particle Spawners make the weather effects and the HUD Messages make the affects on the player. Maybe it is possible to simulate this via custom player classes. Like you could define "Fire.Death" as a state and give the player the Inventory Item "BurningHands", which use hands, which are burning as a dummy *Weapon*. This would archive a similar effect.

Images never look like *shit*, it's the drawer himself who can't do this properly to archive these effects. Just try to play a bit with your favorite Image Editing program, and if you take your time really decent things will come out.

Warp effects can be done again with HUD Messages. Just draw a green texture and set up the necessary alpha of the HUD Message.


So your best friends are *Images*, *ACS* and *Decorate*, as they're together the mightiest tools you might ever have in Doom, before Doom Script comes of course

[ChupaReaper]

I didn't know warp effects could be applied to anything, this changes things... I suppose a good png with a warp added could make a 'camera splash effect' by using a scrolling image, I'm getting too lazy with ACS to be honest, I'll have to have a good look into it to see adsactly what it can do.