What about next-gen particles?

[Shifty Geezer]

Something I've seen that disappoints me somewhat in next-gen screen shots is the simplistic nature of particle effects. They look oft like 2D planes with some rather course blending. An example that leaps to mind was a recent screenshot from Enchant Arm.

PS2 was fairly reknowned for it's particle prowess. My oft called-upon example software is Champions of Norrath that had more particles than it knew what to do with.

Does next-gen offer any advantages or disadvantages for small and numerous graphics effects? Does HDR limit speed of particle blending perhaps, or should Xenos' eDRAM BW absolutely munch through particles? Is there scope for 3D particles and new technologies to really make the visual bling and glam shine?

 

[London Geezer]

Something I've seen that disappoints me somewhat in next-gen screen shots is the simplistic nature of particle effects. They look oft like 2D planes with some rather course blending. An example that leaps to mind was a recent screenshot from Enchant Arm.

PS2 was fairly reknowned for it's particle prowess. My oft called-upon example software is Champions of Norrath that had more particles than it knew what to do with.

Does next-gen offer any advantages or disadvantages for small and numerous graphics effects? Does HDR limit speed of particle blending perhaps, or should Xenos' eDRAM BW absolutely munch through particles? Is there scope for 3D particles and new technologies to really make the visual bling and glam shine?

I'm not sure what you mean for "2D Particles" and "3D Particles". All particles are 3D. And so far, i must agree, we haven't seen much in the particle-front on next gen games.

I'm sure some devs will use them, a lot too, and i'm sure we shouldn't worry about next gen consoles' capabilities of handling a whole lot of particles. Devs seem to think some games really don't have much use for particles. I kind of disagree because i can think a use for particles for pretty much every game out there.

I think ZOE2 is still the best, craziest, busiest example of particle effects.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

3 particles? You mean 2D planes drawn in 3D space? I'm talking about 3D volumetric particles. eg. If a 'Fireball' hits the ground, a 2D sprite shows a round ball of light with a flat edge where the light hits the ground. A 3D particle would basically be a sphere intersecting with a curved edge. If that makes any sense.

 

[London Geezer]

3 particles? You mean 2D planes drawn in 3D space? I'm talking about 3D volumetric particles. eg. If a 'Fireball' hits the ground, a 2D sprite shows a round ball of light with a flat edge where the light hits the ground. A 3D particle would basically be a sphere intersecting with a curved edge. If that makes any sense.

Still not sure what you mean. I think you're talking about alpha effects, like smoke in this generation? Where you can see the smoke "cutting" through the walls and other objects?

 

[Squeak]

I'm not sure what you mean for "2D Particles" and "3D Particles". All particles are 3D. And so far, i must agree, we haven't seen much in the particle-front on next gen games.

I believe he is talking about large billboard and 2d plane particles (as seen in games like Zelda WW and the Prince of Persia games) as opposed to volume particles like 3d textures or voxel arrays.
With Cells general purpose power and ability to collaborate with RSX, such effects should be feasible.

 

[London Geezer]

Ok. By definition a particle is a point in a 3D space. So it's 3D.

One can attach a sprite to it, though i think everyone has been using the alpha polygons approach (lots of alpha textured polygons, like smoke) this generation, which i think is what shifty's talking about.

A very good example of PS2 particles capabilities was the demo included with the PAL PS2 called "Find my own way". Unbelievable at times. Those were a LOT of particles, especially in the "Comet" part of the demo.

Can't wait to see ZOE on PS3.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

As i understand it currently particles are 2D sprites (2 triangle quads) with alpha textures on. I wanna see voxels.

 

[Gholbine]

I was impressed by the particles in the UT2007 demo at the Sony conference at E3.

As for the rest, I imagine that particles are probably one of the last things a developer would implement into their game. Not very important on the grand scale.

 

[Squeak]

One can attach a sprite to it, though i think everyone has been using the alpha polygons approach (lots of alpha textured polygons, like smoke) this generation, which i think is what shifty's talking about.

As i understand it currently particles are 2D sprites (2 triangle quads) with alpha textures on. I wanna see voxels.

See?

 

[London Geezer]

One can attach a sprite to it, though i think everyone has been using the alpha polygons approach (lots of alpha textured polygons, like smoke) this generation, which i think is what shifty's talking about.

As i understand it currently particles are 2D sprites (2 triangle quads) with alpha textures on. I wanna see voxels.

See?

Ok so i understood what he meant.

So, those are not exactly particles per se. And are not volumetric.

Voxels are cool and all, but to get decent looking effects you need high resolution containers (been a while since i used particles on Maya, can't remember if that's the right word) and that drains performance quite a lot.

We'll see if PS3 can handle such effects properly.

 

[two]

Project Force (From software - PS3) has very good particles effects:

 

[reptile]

Particle effects are just that - simulation of particles. As performance goes up, we can use more and more particles thus finer granularity. The "big thing" that people see as "voxels" or "volumetric" particles is that it's now feasible to calculate lighting for them. It was (almost) completely missing from prev and this gen, and will be regarded as a "big step forward" to match offline renderers.

As for particles penetrating objects, i wouldn't expect it to go away - it will be less noticable because of smaller quads used. There are methods to deal with this problem, but most of them aren't really meant for realtime usage. (quick hack: if you have access to the depth of the scene, you can dim the alpha of the particles when they get below a certain proximity threshold)

There are no such thing as "rendering voxels" in the same sense as in rendering triangles or quads - voxels can be visualized through different methods, like slicing or grid-quads, but they all lead us back to the fundamental billboarding.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

There are no such thing as "rendering voxels" in the same sense as in rendering triangles or quads.

Then someone should invent such a thing

Given a typical particle can be readily defined as a spherical volume with distance from centre, it shouldn't be too hard to represent in a post-processing or other shader process as a modification of a pixel's appearance based on proximity of a particle. 'Metaball' like interpolation (don't know that algorithm's proper name) would allow the combination of light to be more realistic than overlapping circles.

 

[London Geezer]

Project Force (From software - PS3) has very good particles effects:

I like the look of next gen smoke, nice and thick. Though that's still just alpha textures, not proper volumetric smoke (which at that distance, in a game as fast and messy as Project Force would be a bit of a waste in my opinion).

Alpha's can look alright if the polygons aren't too big and the textures are well drawn.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

That's one of my points I want to understand better to. Alpha blending on next-gen. From what I've heard to date Xenos will be good at this, RSX less so, due to the BW needed. True? False?

 

[London Geezer]

That's one of my points I want to understand better to. Alpha blending on next-gen. From what I've heard to date Xenos will be good at this, RSX less so, due to the BW needed. True? False?

It's more of a fillrate thing.

 

[Jawed]

It's more of a fillrate thing.

Which on modern GPUs is entirely limited by bandwidth.

Jawed

 

[London Geezer]

It's more of a fillrate thing.

Which on modern GPUs is entirely limited by bandwidth.

Jawed

True, true, but i tend to consider everything else so draining on bandwidth already (from AA to HDR to hi-res and textures and just about everything else), that particles are the last in the list of bandwidth-suchers if you know what i mean.
Don't know, it's just a matter of them being "fillrate limited" than "bandwidth limited" though in the end one affects the other.

 

[Npl]

That's one of my points I want to understand better to. Alpha blending on next-gen. From what I've heard to date Xenos will be good at this, RSX less so, due to the BW needed. True? False?

Xenos will be good at it, RSX alot worse if its just like G70. I still hope RSX will have something like a reasonable sized internal buffers to avoid going to Video-Memory each time.

About Particels intersecting Objects... aslong you render them after everything else( as you do with anything transparent), they shoud be handled by the Z-Buffer like everything else?
The "cutoff"-issue with smoke is that its usually only a few big Sprites instead of using Particles. I see Particles as small Polygons without Textures.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

But as PS3 is already squeezing the available BW with just HDR+AA, is it fair to say it'll likely be at a disadvantage when it comes to masses of particles, and hence those sorts of effects will likely take a backseat?