VFX Advice for a noob

VFX
#1

Hi there. I’m working on a SHMUP with a couple friends, using XNA Game Studio. I primarily do 3D modeling, but I am undertaking to put together some VFX, like energy balls and explosions, etc.

I have a tutorial marked for getting into an actual particle system for XNA, but to keep things more simple, I’ve started off trying to just use an animated sprite sheet. However, I’d like some advice as to what a practical number of frames would be to use for effects like this so as to have a pretty smooth animation, while not being too large a file.

This was my first attempt at an explosion. Should I use some more frames to smooth it up some more? Or should I forget it altogether and just go on to figuring out the particle system functionality?

#2

This maybe of help to you :slight_smile: I bought it a while back, its very affordable! Great for doing shumps where you need to export frames of animation. super easy to learn too


#3

It really depends on what type of game you are making, but in general by going with sprite-based animations you’re using (potentially) massive amounts of texture memory instead of incurring the CPU and GPU overhead of more complex particle systems. However, on modern hardware you’ll probably run out of texture memory before you hit any computational performance problems with simple particle systems like this. Also, if you’re creating a downloadable product where size matters, overall size of your textures on disk is just as important.

#4

As Jesse said it really does depend on what type of game you’re making. But based on your example, I’d say add more frames. Maybe aim for 16 at 128x128 each which is equivalent to a 512x512 texture, not too bad especially if you can reuse the same particle textures in lots of different places. Consider making them grayscale and tinting them in the effect for more variety.

Sound like a fun project!

#5

Thanks for the advice all!

I checked out the demo of that program quick, and it looks pretty sweet. Unfortunately still out of my budget range right now.

Right now we are just working on the initial prototype, and trying to keep things pretty simple. There will only be a ‘bullet’ and an ‘explosion’ so far as effects like this.

We have a plan of sorts, to get certain key elements into the prototype, and then build on that in several stages so as to keep the project manageable.

I’ll try a 16 frame animation like Drew suggested and see if I can get a little better result. :slight_smile:

However, on modern hardware you’ll probably run out of texture memory before you hit any computational performance problems with simple particle systems like this.

Any advice on a practical limit on how much we could use, especially geared towards the Xbox? I would think that as long as we manage what assets are loaded in memory properly for each level, it wouldn’t be too big of a concern, since the sprite animations would be reused. I’m guessing total size of the game for download would probably be more likely to be an issue for us down the road.

#6

Yeah - you probably won’t run into this if it’s a simple game. There’s 512MB of RAM on an XBOX (shared between the GPU and CPU), so unless you really start pushing things you probably won’t run into any issues. Though it’s still worth being careful cause you don’t want your download size to get too high unnecessarily.

#7

Thanks for the info! We’re going to be keeping our (uncompressed) project under 360 MB for at least the first several iterations, since that is the size limit on our free SVN host, so we should be ok for awhile. And once we actually start approaching that, I think we will be far enough along that it will make sense to work on a particle system to make things more shiny and hopefully optimize a little too.

#8

thanks for the info … :slight_smile: really helped me alot i was so tensed in doing my final prject