Particle-based waterfall

Nothing profound - just a simple particle waterfall, in case someone wants a waterfall in their game.

(Anyone else have any waterfalls to share? I've been trying to make a plasma-based waterfall, but at best it looks like a slow-moving stream trickling down a flat surface.)

http://www.mediafire.com/?ljiopddy3jn

Nice effect! You might want to try figuring out a way to use less than 15,000 particles though...

Mmm, this slows down for me .

The splash effect at the bottom that uses 150 particles looks awesome! As for the water fall itself, that uses way too many particles lol. You could probably get decent results with a lot less and perhaps even using plasma...

But yeah, love the splash at the bottom!

Didn't slow down for me, looked pretty cool. I can see why this wouldn't be practical for in-game use though. Maybe a scrolling sprite with a Warp effect for the waterfall itself, but still using plasma?

15,000 particles is about equivalent to 3750 sprites in terms of rendering muscle, so it is going to be slow for a lot of people. Often you can achieve a similar effect with fewer particles by reducing the rate and increasing the particle size.

Hmm, you're right; it works just as well with half the particles at double the size! That's much better.

Is there an inbuilt reason that particles are more efficient than sprites to render? I've also been making a similar waterfall that's entirely event-based, using sprites.

http://www.mediafire.com/?wu4j5dtttub

(Not a very efficient waterfall, but I do need objects to interact with the particles. I'm eventually planning to have a swarm of objects chased through it, encountering some resistance and pushing the blobs of water aside.)

Is there an inbuilt reason that particles are more efficient than sprites to render?

DirectX can draw a particle from a single vertex, but a sprite requires four. So the data to transfer to the GPU is about a quarter that of sprites.

Note though that if you use textured particles, you lose that speed increase .

It's only if you enable certain options like particle rotation, then it has to draw them like sprites... it can texture particles with one vertex just fine and it barely affects performance from my own profiling. Davo can tell you more about which options go to sprite-style rendering.

That's interesting! When the thread's done, I guess I'll add something about particles to that optimization article in the wiki.

Here is a plasma-particle falls you could try I posted a while back.

The is a slime falls but if you play with the colors it could easily look like a waterfall.

I prefer slime myself

That's weird. Half the time it looks really cool, but then it flickers and there's a sheet of low-res black noise over the top of the slimefall.

Maybe it was broken by a Construct update. Could I get you to have a look, and see if it works for you (on this new version?) If not, I might try and pin down something for the bugtracker.

It flickers due to frame-drop, because there's a lot of effects going on in the scene. And the low-res looking bit is because the scale on the plasma object's texture is bumped up to 5.

Oh, okay - the low FPS does explain it. Thanks!