CreamyBlood
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 10, 2005
- Messages
- 1,392
The new movement/combat animations are fucking awesome, but the fires are still ungodly ugly. Are there seriously noone working for those people that know how to make a proper fire with proper smoke/flame trails?
Default flames in Arma 2 are fairly lackluster but it has a heavily modable particle system, you can change many properties to get the effects you want.
Check this out: http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/ParticleArray
It's not as intuitive or easy as using Unity or something similiar but you can make some great effects, you have to learn it and experiment.
I wanted to have burning oil fields like in the Gulf War for one of my missions. I used a script that someone else made and modified it. To be honest, it took me about five days to get the explosions I wanted. I also toned it down a bit. The in-game wind will actually spread your particles but it can kill your frame rate. Earlier iterations had very long streaming smoke stacks in the wind.
The mission I created this for is vanilla with up to six players and you only have to destroy four designated oil pumps. I imagine if you blew up all oil pumps and had eighty people on the server there could be some lag although I haven't and probabably won't test it. Perhaps that's why they leave the basic flames, basic, they don't know if you'll have twenty tanks burning away on the screen at once.
And maybe this isn't impressive in todays world, but I was happy with the effect. I would have liked to get the smoke streaming farther but as I recall I was going to fake it a bit by making the sky darker. Everything has a cost and you have to balance it. Still, I liked what I got. In fact I made a template so that this entire oil field is destructable. Lot's of possibilities.
In testing, sometimes my random helicopters blow up oil pumps while trying to shoot takistans. It's a lot of fun.
Hopefully Arma 3 will look better for you but I'm more into the gameplay myself. For me, the flames can take a second seat in the priority list of things 'to-do'.