Soft Particles

[Urre]

In case you didn't know, the Wolfire team are awesome. Their most recent post points out soft particles, and the effect looks wicked! Why don't we have this? Someone add it to DarkPlaces, quick! Tell LH.

[leileilol]

it's slow for shader model 2 hardware, at least as seen in Quake Wars

[Spirit]

I was going to post this too. Loving their posts.

[frag.machine]

Interesting reading, indeed.

[Teiman]

I love this, but "stairssmall.jpg" is horrible ugly.
I suppose there are some caveats and NO NO about how to use this.

[mh]

I notice they're only using a single quad for their "particles", whereas a Quake implementation would probably need many many quads (at least for a smoke trail). The standard explosion sprite would definitely benefit though.

It's equally possible to get this kind of effect in a non-laggy non-pipeline-stalling manner with occlusion queries, which are more likely to be supported on a wider range of hardware too.

[Urre]

Well you obviously need a quad per particle, nothing odd about that. I didn't really look into the hardware requyirements, I just want it.

It looks very impressive considering it's a single quad, just imagine how awesome it'd be with lots of smaller smoke particles. It should be used on all particles by default, I see no harm in it, visually speaking.

[Sajt]

Oh Urre you skirt chaser.

[Urre]

I don't get it