I am trying to determine a good way to give rain effects using the particle manager. I currently use an image of a blue line for the effect and that works great for all instances other than looking down or looking up…the rain then is falling sideways. This can be seen here:
http://rollarama.captiveimagination.com
darkfrog
Tried to run it, it starts on a black screen with FPS at the bottom then quits… Server problem maybe?
The real problem is you are trying to make particles "3 dimensional" when currently they are thought of as balls or points. If you run the particle editor and choose the rain example, then use the mouse wheel and mouse dragging to enter the rain area, looking up and down works fine since it's a round texture. To make a line work when facing up/down, it would require changing the texture based on looking direction.
Alternatively, it may be possible to add a volumetric scaling param to particle manager. The particle quad would then basically represent a slice of that volume that taken perpendicular to the camera direction. The default would be a 1 "unit" sphere… but say you scaled that volume on the up axis by a factor of 3, then looking at the particle from the side would give you a 1x3 rectangle with your texture stretched along it… effectively giving you a "line". Looking from above or below would result in a 1x1 square though. Thus in theory you get the false impression of volume on the particle.
Interesting, I will look into both of those ideas.
I was considering writing my own "particle manager" of sorts that would just generate 3D lines and recycle them similar to how you do with the particle manager…just seems like a lot of work, but I think would give a much more realistic effect…thoughts?
darkfrog
If you're not able to the get the menu for the game to load I'm not sure what the problem would be. It doesn't do any networking until you go to a network game and then it requests servers. If you're not even seeing the menu that would be a problem with the game. :o
I just tested the game again…although it takes like 10 seconds for it to load once the black screen comes up it works just fine for me. I know better than to suggest its a hardware issue on your machine. :-p
darkfrog
Well it is my work machine, but it has a 9800XT with latest drivers, so I doubt that.
Do the jME demos work? 
Do you see any error messages or anything when you run it? It's quite discouraging it would just die like that. :o
darkfrog
No errors, and yes, every other demo seems to work, including our own jME game. ;) There might be something on the webstart console, i'll see if I can capture it when I go to work tomorrow.
That is appreciated…unlike Microsoft I don't consider my application crashing to just be a hidden feature and would like to figure it out so I can fix it. :roll:
darkfrog
Looks like it was a sound issue. My sound card had issues which once I fixed, everything ran ok.
wouldnt it be better to use particles that just rotates/billboards around the y-axis for rain?
except the particles are always facing the camera in the particle manager…it gives the effect of sideways rain drops coming down…quite scary actually. :-p
darkfrog
that should be added as an option then…just like the billboardnode has the options(and code) for type axial, screen_aligned and camera_aligned…
particles do incorporate automatic camera aligned billboarding… it could be switched to allow for axis aligned, screen aligned, etc… BUT, unfortunately it wouldn't look that great from above or below in AXIS mode since you'd only see the edge of a quad (a sliver if anything.)
Also, once particles are not directly pointing at the camera, the effect is pretty much ruined.
That's why I was thinking of creating my own particle system in essence that would contain actual 3D lines so the effect is not lost. Does that sound feasable to you?
darkfrog
Maybe instead of creating a new one, you could look at extending or modifying the existing one to handle lines
hmmm…that's not a bad idea…I'll look into that.
thanks again!
darkfrog