Vorticles! ... er ... Poxels!
Added 2019-06-12 20:26:22 +0000 UTCNearing completion of the bulk of the particle stuff in the Voxoid engine for Battledroid. We've got two types of particles so far... the usual billboard particles that face the camera which are what everyone uses, and voxel particles! They're cubes! I think they need a cool name like "vorticles", or maybe "poxels". What do you think?
The poxels have both diffuse and emissive colour, so can light the diffuse aspect with whatever lights happen to be nearby, and the emissive aspect is used for flames and sparks and the like.
We'll possibly be adding "trails" as well, which are triangle strips used for rendering stretchy particles.
Current performance... well, we can do 13 million particles in a couple of milliseconds. We can't actually do more than 13 million because there's an int in the pipeline somewhere that overflows :D Also the graphics card hits the limits of overdraw way before we get anywhere near that anyway.
Did I mention we use order-independent transparency rendering now for all things? It certainly simplifies everything a whole lot... well, as you can see from the amusing graphic at the top of the post, it made it a lot simpler for me at the expense of making Super Attack Programmer Dan's life much more "interesting". Still, he likes making shaders. All hail Dan and his shader wizardry.
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