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[Stainless]

Well I need to do a lot more research.

EmitFrq makes no sense if it is particles per second. Looking at effects you see things like the max particles being say 256, the particle life time 1 second. The effect life time 6 seconds. EmitFrq 6.

So it would generate 6 particles per second that last for one second. I.E. the max number of particles ever visible is 6. Can't be right.

More research needed.

Anyway here are some videos which show my progress.

https://youtu.be/FmvUGJYww0A

https://youtu.be/jC5XdRsyNyY

[Stainless]

Nothing is making sense.

I'm seeing effects with a finishtime and livetime  of 0
effects with start and end color of transparent black
effects with max particles 120 and an emitfrq of 256

None of this is making sense.

Has anyone got a set of tested and documented effects I can use as a reference

[Dreamk]

Stainless - keep in mind that only the core Il2 effects can be used as a basis for trying to understand what's behind the various parameters. The other sources effects are NOT reliable.

[santobr]

There is nothing wrong.
When finish time is 0, it means that it will emit forever (ex: airplane damage fire and smoke).
When lifetime is 0, that effect was disabled by the autor, the same for the transparent effect.
Why?
Sometimes an effect is made by two or more effects at the same time, but the autor of the mod optimises it to less effects or particles.

Less particles than EmitFrq x lifetime means an intermittent effect. The emission will stop until the first particle disappears.

You can see intermittent fire in my video:




santobr.

[Stainless]

I've spent some time extracting the stock effects from the game and I'm going to concentrate on those for a while. Should give me more consistent data.

I've also got a copy of Unreal 4. We are starting to use it at work, so I can have the full source code for it. Some parts of the engine are really nice. I'm going to do a test project which just imports an aircraft from this site and displays it. If that goes smoothly, then I may decide to use Unreal. Means I have to rewrite my FDM though, might be a good idea anyway. I have learnt a hell of a lot about flight dynamics since I started and could do a much better job.

Does mean I get a Mac, Android, and PS4 version for "free".... maybe worthwhile.

Also I have talked to a guy who is doing a set of Unreal plugins to support joysticks. I mean many, many joysticks. That would be something worth having. I don't want to have to buy a dozen different joysticks just to make sure they work in the game.

My main concern is terrain. Unreal gives me a good starting point. Grass and trees look very good, as does water. However the terrain is flat. I need it to have curvature.

Well we will see.

[Stainless]

Spent the weekend adding a "Export as FBX" command to my modtool.

I came to the conclusion that writing a plugin for UE4 when I'm not sure I'm going to use it was a waste of time.

All went well until I tested it.

The FBX files import into UE4, but the materials don't. Nothing I could do would get the materials to display.

So I downloaded a test tool from autodesk and loaded my FBX files up in that. Same thing. No textures, no materials.

No Fecking idea why.

Anybody have a good FBX text mode file with textures and materials?

[Stainless]

 ???

Embarrassed.

Spent ages going through the code looking for mistakes, found nothing. Finally noticed that the texture filename was wrong. I was using Material.Name instead of Material.TextureName.

 ???

Ow well.

Still could do with a fbx file with multiple materials in it for testing, but most MSH files now export as FBX files correctly.

The effect editor is coming on nicely as well.

I am now happy with the particle systems, but I need to do some more work on the smoke trail particle systems.

Does anyone know how these are displayed in game?

Are they just particles?

Or are they polygons?

I am thinking to get a vapour trail to look correct in game you might need to create a polygon from the last position to the next position. So one polygon per frame.

Need Input.
Input,
Innnnnnpppppuuutttt
 

[Dreamk]

vapour trail are created by changing the speed of emission of particles and their lifespan - not through polygons.

[Stainless]

Doesn't that look shit though?

I'm thinking that if you fly at an angle through a vapour trail, since the particles are square and view aligned, you would see them "rotate" towards you.

Is that an artifact you see in game?

[Stainless]

I'm now happy with the standard particle systems, they look really good.

The other two though, not happy.

The trail particle systems just look terrible, as I predicted they would, so I have had a good think about them. I am now SURE they use polygon particles.

My proof is the textures used themselves. Look at any of them and you can see they are designed to join end to end. This makes them useless as normal view aligned particles.

Unless anyone can prove to me I'm wrong, I'm going to implement a polygon cross particle system and try that. This involves creating two quads. One along the XY plane and one along the XZ plane.

The end points are calculated from the emit position and the emit velocity. so a single particle kinda looks like this.

[Stainless]

I almost have FBX export working, it's frustratingly close.

I have uploaded a test aircraft here....

http://stainlessbeer.weebly.com/downloads.html

It's test.zip at the bottom of the page.

Can someone who has the ability to edit FBX files in a 3D editor have a look at it for me please?

What I need someone to do is import one or two of the FBX files, fix any errors, and then re-export it as FBX. From this I can do a diff and see what I am doing wrong.

What I am seeing is this.

[SAS~Ghost129er]

Found it; the UV Mapping for that particular section is buggered up. Luck isn't on your side as I suck at UV Mapping, like, big time... Maybe someone good at UV mapping can fix it though, but there's your problem.