Rick

hmm. I think I'll try billboards for the particles first. I'll create my own emitter I guess then.

Yeah, I realize that. I guess my first thought it going to always be how can I do this in pure LE first. If there is 0% chance of doing it then I'll look somewhere else.

Lumooja, I use LE so I don't have to use OpenGL. Not following what you mean Josh.

I was thinking more of ending the "life" of it instantly. Not delete. I read that they are recycled and that's fine, but I'd like to end the life of a given particle instantly if it hits something so it can be recycled. If I had the position of each active, alive, whatever you want to call it, I could do some collision checks to see if they hit something. I also realize that we put particles in the transparency world and the models would be in the main world, but I should still be able to check positions for what would be a collision. My idea currently it to create a rain cloud if you will. It will have raining coming from it, but I want the rain particles to stop when they collide with anything.

Is there any feasible way to get particle collisions? I don't care about any sort of response or velocity or where it happened, I just need to know it happened, and be able to kill that particle. Even if I could get the position of the particle I could find out collision myself.

What about if you had a radius of rain particles that followed the player around and started at a certain height (way up high). Would need particle collision to destroy the particle when it collides with something though so it doesn't go through buildings. Are we able to get any sort of particle collision in LE, or could we simulate it somehow. All we would really need to know is if a particle hit something and if it did, destroy it instantly. Wouldn't need to know anything else like velocity or point of collision or anything. If you were looking from the outside at this character it would look strange because they would have this radius of rain following them, but from the characters point of view it would look like real rain.

That would be nice. The only 2 ways I can think of is physics or faking it. The water plane could fake it. Rotate the plane anyway you want and apply a scrolling texture to it of water running down. I was poking around WoW's files the other day and that's how they do it. They actually modeled the entire water flow for a small rivers and waterfalls on a plan with scrolling textures. They actually made 2 planes. The bottom plane didn't have scrolling textures, but the top plane did.

That's a very good question that I failed to think about lol. I'm open to suggestions. My first thought, which is probably brute force, would be to have more weather boxes that are sort of void weather boxes. When the camera collides with them it cancels the screen weather effect. The question then would be how do you make it look like it's raining on the outside when you are inside looking out.

So I'm trying to think of different ways to make a weather system object that you can drag into your scene. I'd be interested in hearing other ideas you all have. It would be a physics body that you can size to your liking (while in editor mode it would provide a semi-transparent texture so you can see the size changes you are making without having to turn on physics. This wouldn't appear when in game mode). It would have settings like: Rain Snow Fog These would also have some settings to allow specific timing or % or what would happen, etc. You can select any or just 1 or 2 that you want to happen inside this physics body. When the main camera collides with the physics body is when you would get the full screen effect that is showing this weather effect happening. Thoughts?

Yeah I could copy how it's done, but it doesn't look good for smaller bodies of water like pools, small ponds, or even water in a sink. I'll need to tweak things some to get the right look.

That's actually the route I'm going to mess around with this weekend. Although when I use the default water for smallerr areas of water I'm not a fan of how it looks, so I might have a slight variation of it.

parent things to each other. Put a pivot in the center of the sun that is the parent to a planet. Then when you rotate that pivot the planet will go with it around the sun. Then put another pivot in the center of the planet and make that the parent to the moon and when you rotate that pivot the moon will do with it, etc etc. This will probably require some lua scripting though.

lol, yeah, I couldn't get it to work. About the puddles being a single infinite water plane, the problem with the infinite water plane is the height of things. If my castle is high on a mountain I can't have an infinite plane for the water. I need a plane that I can control the size of. This would also work for things like swimming pools or like a wishing well. Anything that needs water that can't be done with the 1 single infinite plane. I might actually have to change this to a cube though because currently no matter what if the camera x & z are in the bounds of the plane and the camera y is < the water plane y it'll do the underwater effect to the screen. This limits having tunnels under the water plane because even though visually you aren't in water, if your tunnel goes under the water plane it would apply the underwater effect. With a cube I could limit the water on all sides. This cube could just be a body I guess.

Yeah, I can distribute the new shader with the object. Thanks for the tip.

Nevermind, I guess it is swaying, just very little. Is there a way to make the swaying maybe more powerful?

Actually I think I got it. I used the material editor, which didn't display it very well, and it looks better in the editor. Now I have to see if I can apply the sway shader to get it to move. Hmm, I have: shader="abstract::mesh_diffuse_bumpmap_sway.vert","abstract::mesh_diffuse_bumpmap_specular_glow.frag" shadowshader="abstract::refraction.vert","abstract::ambientlight.frag" but no sway.

Do you have an example texture of the windows that I can test with? Maybe I'm screwing my textures out.

How was it originally. I'm not home and don't have access to see it. If it wasn't allowing a setting to change it then this should be something Josh puts into the final version because it would suck to have to make sure this doesn't get overwritten with updates.

Pixel is correct. Think of something like glass. It would be semi-transparent not all or nothing. I'm looking for this for water. I have created a water object that lets you drag water into your scene. It's not an infinite plane like the water that comes so you can have many different instances used at all sorts of different heights at different sizes. You could use it for large bodies of water or puddles if you like. In fact I have an idea of making a weather object that you can link this water object to and the weather object can talk to these water objects to tell them when it's raining or not. This could them cause the water objects to raise vertically to a defined per instance level when it rains and to lower to a defined per level when it's sunny over a given time amount to give the effect of puddles forming and drying up. So far I have the water but the texture I use is solid. If I could make it semi-transparent it would look better. If I can get that I can start looking at the other effects needed, like reflections and underwater effects. This seems odd that this hasn't been done in the editor by anyone.

So what do I have to do to get semi-transparent textures on my model to show up as semi-transparent via the editor? What would the steps be?

So have you guys ever tried any trasparent texture on a model in the editor? If so how, what did you do to get it to work?

I actually seen some 2010 bugs at work also. Seems people thought it was a good idea to do 200* when looking for files.

Didn't seem to matter. I put the paint both inside transparency and main worlds and same result.

Right, but it sounds like you guys are talking about putting more than 1 message in a packet. So the player update, then some other stuff, then some other stuff and then send it. So would you look at the bytes in your message and if > a certain amount send it? You can try packing messages together, but I think it's more trouble than it's worth. Until I get issues I'm going to just make a packet and send it off. I didn't see issues when using RakNet and that's how I did it so I'll see if the same is true for LE's. I'm thinking the overhead of a packet isn't enough for me to put together a system to try and put together multiple messages in a packet and then send.

Hmm, I did: SetWorld(world_transparency) object.plane = CreatePlane() object.mat = LoadMaterial("Models/Entities/Pi/Pi-Water/water4.mat") object.plane:Paint(object.mat) SetWorld(world_main) But got the same result. If I open the dds in Paint.NET and change transparency to 125 or below then it doesn't show up at all.