Smoke ... oh yeah ... hadn't there been something already? Well, not just something. Smoke was and is a major topic (and more often than I wish an issue) in D2X-XL, and an important area of constant tweaking and improvement. The last step in this process had been removing a lot of the smoke settings from the user interface; both due to my having gathered enough experience to be able to offer good settings for both weaker and stronger hardware, and to simplify the user interface.

It has turned out though that particle effects have the biggest impact on D2X-XL's rendering speed, and that a simple solution for this cannot not satisfy every user and work for every hardware. I have therefore added smoke detail settings back to D2X-XL. You can find them in a submenu of the effect options menu. Expert options in the miscellaneous options menu need to be enabled to be able to access it.

One effect of my doing this was that I could re-tweak smoke settings and find new default settings that burden the renderer less and still look good (if not even better than before). The usual approach to particle rendering is to put a lot of detail into the particle texture, thus relieving the requirement of a huge amount of particles to create a believable effect. So instead of rendering tons of small particles, few large, detailled textures are rendered. The right approach to achieve acceptable frame rates with huge amounts of smoke around is therefore to decrease smoke density and increase particle size, and this is the direction I went this time. The backdraw is that a missile smoke trail will obscur the player's sight right after the missile has been fired. This is relieved to fewer particles being rendered and hence the smoke not being that thick. The advantage is that smoke trails seen in some distance will still look good while consuming comparably little computing power for their management and rendering.

Another nifty effect I added is a beautiful concentric explosion shockwave effect. The animation's textures have been created by the people from the Freespace Open project (which btw. has the friendliest internet community I have ever met on the internet - and I had said that already more than once before having been granted to use their art assets ).

Unfortunately I had to find out that the shrapnel effect D2X-XL displays when a robot blows up usually completely hid the new shockwave effect. After my tweaking the smoke rendering once again I had however noticed that debris looked just gorgeous now with its thick smoke trail and irregular trajectory. So I made a virtue of necessity and replaced the shrapnel effect by the possibility to increase the amount of debris created by exploding robots, and boy does it look good!

Here's a short video showing all the new settings and effects in action.

The shockwave distortion effect I have described in a previous worklog entry has been tweaked to properly take depth information in account in order not to distort geometry too far in front of it.