To check on correct installation, destroyed buildings and vehicles are what make the better diagnostic. They will have the smoke initially rise a bit more steeply, then become more level as the upward buoyancy is damped. But overall the smoke column is largely horizontal yet virtually always clearing the ground by at least a bit of height.
Poor Clive (genXgamer) has these smoke columns firmly scraping the ground, never with the slightest meaningful space underneath.
Incidentally, the 'wind' driving the smoke and other effect particles is what I call the "effect wind". The speed is set by the Wind parameter in an .eff file, and is randomly varied about this mean value as the game runs. The direction is also random, and is NOT in any way tied to the wind you can set in a mission and which acts upon planes.
Here's an area that, presumably, TD might be able to address. This "effect wind" seems to be controlled in a .dll, and so is beyond the access of us mere modders. I would love to see the "effect wind" direction be tied to the wind direction the player/mission builder would set in his .mis file. Then one could use smokes just like a windsock, at least to gauge direction. But alas, we must endure a random, and varying direction during a mission, for this "effect wind" as it acts upon smokes.
This could well be the reason effect smokes were originally--or at least very early on--given characteristics that resulted in vertical or nearly vertical columns. This would largely disguise the random--and varying--"effect wind" direction.
And if some considerable velocity was given to such a smoke effect, it might initially move mostly horizontally, but then the typically considerable vertical acceleration value assigned would take over, resulting in a fairly quick transition to a much more vertical column.
My approach is geared to present smoke columns as having a typical appearance, in all but calm or near calm conditions. The method requires a careful balancing between the Wind, EmitVelocity and GasResist values in an .eff file. If one changes, so too will one or both of the others have to be adjusted in order to obtain the expected column slope and variance. Not only that, but the EmitRate might require adjustment in order to accommodate the spacing between particles, and the LiveTime to obtain the desired column length.
This complexity essentially rules out the application of an "effect wind" that can vary with the "mission wind" to any notable degree. A faster speed would have the smoke particles spread farther apart, making the smoke column look oddly 'dotted' into a largely discontinuous chain in the early stage. And a slow speed would have the column more bunched into a rather shorter column.
I hope that revealing these issues does not too badly ruin things, because, yes, there is a resulting departure from realism.
But in compensation, my highly structured approach, involving the reorientation of effect particle emission vectors in Java, brings about a pleasing uniformity of behaviour. Previously, smokes could be seen to emit from a number of objects in a horizontal direction tied to their orientation, the differences in direction being jarringly discordant. And the not uncommon sight of a smoke column first being directed horizontally, then arcing more vertically as the particles continued to accelerate upward (!), is opposite to the vastly more common phenomenon of smoke columns becoming more horizontally directed with height.
A lot of verbiage, I know! Perhaps it's better to say nothing, to not break the spell of illusion with the brutal facts. But the teacher in me drives me to provide information that aids in understanding. My philosophy is to not merely provide the fish, but to teach how to angle.
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Topic: WxTech's Effects Pack v1.5 for B.A.T and 4.12 (Read 18630 times)
