Makin' It Rain - How Raindrop Effects Work In 2D Games
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Makin' It Rain - How Raindrop Effects Work In 2D Games
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Re: Makin' It Rain - How Raindrop Effects Work In 2D Games
#2Welp, looks like I crashed their server...
Update: There it goes!
Re: Makin' It Rain - How Raindrop Effects Work In 2D Games
#3haha awesome, you blew my server up. Upgrading now but it'll take a couple days they say.
Anyone reading: that's my game development blog, I'm starting an iPhone game dev studio and documenting the progress of starting it up and making the first game, day by day!
Check it out if you're interested in game dev and feel free to ask any questions!
- Quickdraw
Re: Makin' It Rain - How Raindrop Effects Work In 2D Games
#4To me, the biggest lesson I've learn from game programming tips and tricks was to not model the world exactly. Just model it enough to trick the eye. My first inclination was, "but of course you need the splats where the rain drop line ends! How would it make sense otherwise?" But it's not until you see the video that you get that, hey that worked well enough.
I imagine it's applicable to other realms of programming as well, like web programming. We should question if we really need something on the page, or if there's just some way to fake it or get away with doing less. Or same with scheduling notifications to be delivered. Does it really need to be real-time? Or can we just cheat a little since the tolerance is much higher?
Re: Makin' It Rain - How Raindrop Effects Work In 2D Games
#5Or you could use color cycling:
http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/?sound=0
(choose 'Highland Ruins - Rain' and show the options to see the palette).
Crazy in these modern times, of course.
Re: Makin' It Rain - How Raindrop Effects Work In 2D Games
#6Or you could use color cycling: http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/?sound=0 (choose 'Highland Ruins - Rain' and show the options to see the palette). Crazy in these modern times, of course.
Good for backgrounds, but it can't be used effectively if you need rain to appear in front of another layer (in this case, the character sprite).
Re: Makin' It Rain - How Raindrop Effects Work In 2D Games
#7iamwil: "My first inclination was, "but of course you need the splats where the rain drop line ends! How would it make sense otherwise?""
Exactly, I think that's default programmer-logic. "If there's a drop, it must have a splat." I used to do some programming but I'm more of an artist than a progger so I figure writing about little artsy tricks like that might help other devs out. It can be rough trying to fit cool stuff onto tiny phones haha
Luc: I'm a pixel artist at heart so I love color cycling, but ya, appearing in front of another layer blows it up. Also these days I don't think iPhone games use palettes much...I know older cel phones needed them, but for iPhone I seem to be able to get away with just using big ol' .PNGs with no palettes (which rules, 'cause I can get anti-aliased edges).
- Quickdraw
Re: Makin' It Rain - How Raindrop Effects Work In 2D Games
#8iamwil: "My first inclination was, "but of course you need the splats where the rain drop line ends! How would it make sense otherwise?"" Exactly, I think that's default programmer-logic. "If there's a drop, it must have a splat." I used to do some programming but I'm more of an artist than a progger so I figure writing about little artsy tricks like that might help other devs out. It can be rough trying to fit cool…
It's also interesting just from a project management point of view, or anyone doing a startup, imo. Good blog!
Re: Makin' It Rain - How Raindrop Effects Work In 2D Games
#9haha awesome, you blew my server up. Upgrading now but it'll take a couple days they say. Anyone reading: that's my game development blog, I'm starting an iPhone game dev studio and documenting the progress of starting it up and making the first game, day by day! Check it out if you're interested in game dev and feel free to ask any questions! - Quickdraw
I'm very interested in iPhone game development. I'm working on a title for PC/Xbox based on the XNA framework and finding it fairly easy to use. Is there anything like that for the iPhone? Any good place to find a comparison of frameworks? I'm not averse to coding interactions by hand (trying to make a 2D RPG, not a platformer, so Torque isn't appropriate), but I can't make sense of the options.
Re: Makin' It Rain - How Raindrop Effects Work In 2D Games
#10Or you could use color cycling: http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/?sound=0 (choose 'Highland Ruins - Rain' and show the options to see the palette). Crazy in these modern times, of course.
Those color cycling demos are amazing. Unfortunately, color cycling has fallen out of practice both because it is too hard to teach artists and because the double-lookup-per-pixel is memory bandwidth intensive on modern hardware (old systems had dedicated hardware to support this).