Well ill get right to it.... I am in the last 2 weeks of my Final Project at full sail and i am having a problem with My particles blending with the world.. I cannot turn of Ztest cause it messes up the look.. So here it goes I am thinking of two options either Z sorting or some unknown function i have yet to find in renderware.. Id like to hear any suggestions as far of this please.. Right now what im trying is a Z sorting algo using the Distance of the camera to the particle and then bubble sorting through the array... However it may look good but when u rotate the camera to some areas the Alpha will go totally off... ATM all the particles are stored in their own array and after updated they are pushed to the Ptank anyways please feel free to give any advice....

How come you have a license for Renderware without the corresponding NDA forbidding you to ask such questions on public forums :-) ?

Turning off ZWrite solves most problems people have with blended particle systems.. not sure if it''s applicable in Renderware but if it isn''t, Renderware truly sucks =)

1. the words "bubble" and "sort" should never be seen on the internet unless when describing what shouldn''t be seen on the internet. use radix or quicksort.

2. if you cant turn of depth-writing (i still cant work out how it would ruin the effect) then remember to sort using the distance squared (i.e. cut out that nasty square root).

3. camera rotations shouldn''t affect your particles what so ever. as you as you''re using billboarding they should always be displayed correctly.

4. somewhere along the like you''re alpha channel is getting screwed (probably on the vertex level, not texture).

could u post a screenie of this effect to see why depth writes can''t be turned off?

fwiw, a bubble sort is most effective on partially sorted data. Implemented correctly, drawing alpha quads to screen with bubble sort can be just as fast as radix or quick because of the good spatial coherence. Back in the days of 2000 polygons per frame (200 MHz machine?) I just sorted every polygon with bubble sort and it worked sweet.

Not sure how it would work with particles though as they''re pretty random. Yes, I use radix sort

I am a Game Design Student at Full Sail.. Full sail recived a license for their students to use RenderWare... however the students do not get access to RenderWare forums for asking questions ect.. I havent been informed of any such NDA at fullsail... Any how


I have somewhat figured the problem out... I am able to have the particles rendering correctly for almost all occurances however i still find problems here and there. I am working atm with our lead Engine programmer to figure out if the problem I am encountering has to do with how the camera is rotating on the world or what effects this is having on the effects. There is alot of things we need to learn about RW it seems, and unfortunatly we dont have access to their boards to access some good info =)

Thanks for the Help folks.... Ill post some ScreenShots of the problems...


Ok Turning Z testing off is a problem because, The world is rendered then I render the particles, the particles will blend fine however u will see them through objects in the world which in other circumstances would block the view of said particles


[edited by - Jedite on April 25, 2003 7:13:47 AM]