Plasma Example

An example of the plasma object

Haha! Great! This will definately be a useful feature!

maybe add some control to what colour you can light an object and a gradient like in the original mmf extension great work also! it seems pretty damn complex to make this.

also ive been searching around the web and maybe this can be of assistance http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/ ... _fire.html

it works similar to how yours works and might be of use

The link you provided doesn't work

The plasma object isn't the flame object, so it does work a little bit differently. If you paste an object in that has different colours in it, each colour will be blurred and subtracted from, allowing you to create multi-coloured visual effects (such as the example). Maybe with another multiplied map it would be possible to make the colours fade out with a tint rather than just becoming more transparent....so you could make white fade out to a red shade...or you could make all colours tint to black to make a more smoke like effect... I dont know. As for gradients, I plan to add a shader which allows you to use an image and it will take greyscale values of each pixel and map it to the texture...this could then be used by more than just the flame object, however it does require a pixel shader.

When I programmed the flame object for MMF I looped each pixel and mapped it to the image of the gradient in a filter blit. But without a pixel shader, you cant do this in direct X (or at least without major slowdown) so when I write this shader it might only be pixel shader 2 compatible, in which case people using the flame object will need to account for how it might look if people don't have the hardware to support pixel shader 2. Anyway its still possible to achieve nice effects without it mapping to a gradient.

BTW in what way is it hard to use? If you drop the object in the layout and set the background to black it works... I just use a couple of actions to make the shapes in the background move around etc.

maybe add some control to what colour you can light an object and a gradient like in the original mmf extension great work also! it seems pretty damn complex to make this.

I was just messing around with different effects on the plasma object to see if I could come up with some natural-looking fire, and hey guess what? The Flame effect works friggin beautifully. I was trying all sorts of things like making the Plasma a mask to cut through to a gradient underneath it and stuff, then I saw Flame and I was all like "how did I not notice that one before?"

Anyway, here it is:

http://www.fileshack.us/get_file.php?id ... e=fire.cap

Bam, instant fire. The Flame effect overrides the color information of the sprite you're pasting, and only goes off of the gradient you specify in the Flame effect itself. I bumped up the Clip Percentage a little to make the edges softer, but other than that it's all default settings.

Oh yeah, forgot about that effect lol

Is there a way to make good looking fire without ps? And does it work on any background?

Is there a way to make good looking fire without ps? And does it work on any background?

Well the Flame effect is ps 2 only so, I'd guess not with that type of method. I'm sure someone can come up with a decent looking alternative. I've had some ok results with making a second sprite that's exactly the same as the first, only colored with a red and yellow gradient that I place behind the first sprite. It wasn't as good as the ps2 Flame effect, but it looked okay. Of course it would be a pain to make doubles of animated sprites like that, but hey.

And yeah, it works on any background.

No pixel shaders were hurt in the process of making this example

oh i dint think of using more than 1 flame object, that was all but impossible (i mean reallly laggy) in the first flame object, so i dint think of that, i gues you can just make a gradient that way

Yeah hehe.....hardware acceleration for the win...however it would probably be better if plasma object itself could render multiple copies of itself on top of each other. Using render states and filters I can make each separate layer a different opacity, colour, etc...I'll look into it and try to find a solution that is both simple and powerful

Yep render states and filtered layers looks like the way to go.

I demonstrated the effect by pasting a plasma into a canvas object, then pasting that canvas into another canvas several times with different filters, and you can see the result

Also noticed I've stuff up something with time delta...I think the subtract map's opacity isn't affected by time delta and therefore the plasma object looks different at differnet frame rates...woops

AWSOME! This plugin kicks ass!

Edit: Why is it shaking like crazy? Can that be prevented?

oh i dint think of using more than 1 flame object

Yeah, me neither I kept trying to do it with more than one sprite. Much more efficient this way (especially if your sprites are animated). Sometimes the simplest solutions are the most elusive.

I still think the Flame effect applied to Plasma looks a little more flamey, but if you want to have an alternative for non ps2 cards this would be the way to go.

i just hate that raggy edge you get with the flame effect,