The darker smoke does look a lot better, but as you mentioned - the lighter/white "smoke" would do a brilliant job with mist/steam/fog [grin]

Have you considered adapting the particle system to allow a sort of "drifting" fog or mist? Could make for an interesting atmosphere if your character is exploring a room/area that has a bit of water that has a sort of steam/fog drifting across the surface...

Jack

Kinda offtopic but will you allow some parts of the environment to break or morph in realtime? It would be kinda cool to notice a crack in the wall, hit it causing a secret path to show up...or hit a statue in a narrow tunnel causing it to crumble and block the path infront of a swarm of pursuers...
I dunno

Wow! I like the dark smoke alot better.

Any chance we could see a video of the smoke in motion?

I just made a movie of the smoke, but right now it's for team members only. In about a month, we should have something to show to a wider audience.

Yes, I use real spherical physics to avoid intersecting the geometry.

Re: # of particles. I switched between 14 and 21 particles throughout these shots, so I'm not sure which is which, but most are probably 21.

Re: drifting fog - yes, one of the things I'd like to do is ground-based mist that can be influenced by the player, and other moving objects.

That would be a great level : have a ghost or invisible enemy - you can only see him when he displaces the mist!

Re: Breaking the environment. There are a couple of things that discourage real-time geometry changes. The major one is the lighting system. To be able to handle many lights with many characters & objects, I keep the lights motionless, and rely on static geometry not to change. I think real shadows with either moving lights or breakable geometry is not super-practical for dx8-level hw. I think you'd need high-end dx9 hw to make this work well in a real-time game with a wide-open environment.

More kabooms.

Quote:Re: drifting fog - yes, one of the things I'd like to do is ground-based mist that can be influenced by the player, and other moving objects.

That would be a great level : have a ghost or invisible enemy - you can only see him when he displaces the mist!

That would indeed be awesome - make sure that makes it into the game [oh]

Jack