Col Gibbon, send me a PM and clear your PMs(says your over the limit). I saw your post in another forum and have some info that might help you.

Hi,

this is what i can get in EAW, without to much fps lost.

When i made this screenshots, the game was paused, so all planes have the same position.











Greetings,

Knegel

Yes, I remember VBH's clouds. Not possible to do anything more at the time.

The original programmers probably dropped the idea of 3D clouds because of FPS hits and computer limitations 10 or 12 years ago.
More's the pity, since clouds are both beautifully immersive and useful to fighter pilots (and very irritating to bombardiers).
New possibilities have opened up, thanks to creative thinking, and it's already fascinating. I'm impressed.

Looks like you, Ralf, and maybe Gibbs are onto something good.

FXEXE trial version:



VonBeerhofen

Knegel,
The pure sprites of EAW can only be used for learning. You can do little more then it's limitations. You and Woody should be well versed on the limitations of EAW particles. ') even if you don't realize it.

VBH,
The boundries for the differance in detail are clearly visable. It's a beautiful pic. please stop being so hard nosed and share with them what you learn through assembly. None of us will ever be rich from modding. It's all about partnership (comrads).

Do what any of you wish. It's a hobby.

There's nothing to teach Brit,

observant modders probably long noticed it's not a sprite but a simple 5 year old 3DZ model which was shelved because of lack of transparency (which problem was recently cured) and I'm very curious what creations people will think of to get the most out of this, after all with a 3D model there are hundreds of possible shapes, not just one, as in a sprite. It's just harder to come up with an appropriate shape or shapes.



VonBeerhofen

Hi,

my clouds are never exact the same and they work like real clouds, as more you get into them, as less you can see and then the sight clears up slowly again.

The there can be many different basic shapes, due to some random influece they still wont look the same.







This is made with some default sprites, unfortunatelly there is no smooth white default smoke sprite, still the result in game is not to bad.

Of course such clouds bring a big impact to the fps, nothing else can be expected.

Allen,

iam not sure anymore that this wont work.

Look to the fps and this is made while all, not just the closest cloud, are generated out of many hundret drawn sprites.

By using a much simplyfied cloud routine for clouds with bigger distance, the fps should stay high.

Actually the sprite system can work very much like the other cloud generating codes i saw, where only the closest cloud get generated with many layers, while the other clouds have just one 2d graphic which get always rotated to stand in a good position to the current view point.

I will see if i can find out how to edit the sprites. As more smooth the sprite is drawn, as bigger i can blow it up, as less sprites i need, as less the performence will suffer.

Greetings,

Knegel

Hi Ralf,

Just remember the golden rule.

The same cloud in the same position on every multi-players machine.

The last thing you want is one player hiding in a cloud on his machine, while he is totally in the clear on an attacking players machine.

Thats actually the smalest problem.

Hi Ralf.

Could you try getting the simple 2D vertical clouds working? Even with moving 2D clouds in the distance, say 1000m from view point, the effect would be great.

Can't we mimic the effect of flying through a cloud by extending the Grey out time? I've always thought the time going through our levels of cloud are too short.