More effects work this week, as I thought I'd revisit fire, rain and snow. Snow looked ultra bad, rain was ok but the splashes were annoying. Fire was not "fluid" enough as it was a 2-frame animation. As again I could use such effects for trailer material, I needed to revisit, and not spend too long on it.

Fire

This is now using brullov's sprites, which I think fits nicely with the style; not perfect, but much better. New fire video below, in the form of a "fire nova" effect, where flames expand radially to all tiles until a specified radius, blocked by anything that blocks visibility. It's using a new "wave" particle system that sorts tiles that particles are spawned, and spawns particles there delayed according to distance.

New fire sprites, used in a fire nova radial effect

Snow

I got rid of my old particle system and horrible sprite, and I've added something super-simple and tweaked the fall to be slightly different. I think it looks better now: new (below) vs old. It's still super simple and not configurable in terms of heavy snowfall, wind speed etc, but those don't really matter much, for now.

Rain and thunder

New snow particle system

Rain was ok, but the splashes were horrible. Can't find an old video to show you, but new version video is below, and sound on please. Rain drops are now vertical and splashes are much better, courtesy of GreenMask Games. Also, inspired by another dev, I decided to add thunder and lightning. This happens only during rain in warmer climates, and it's a short flash including a booming sound. The effect of the flash is to heavily increase contrast, as a poor-man's HDR effect, where because of the bright light (from the strike) and our eyes trying to accomodate to it, the darker areas become pitch black. In practice, it's like a sigmoid applied to the brightness of the image.

Rain, thunder and lightning. Sound ON, thunder at 9 seconds in

That's it for this week, enjoy your weekend all!