Riftrunner Peek of the Week #7

The seventh installment of RPGVault’s “Peek of the Week” feature for the upcoming Divine Divinity sequel is now available. This time, Larian’s Stijn Valkenborg talks about implementing the visual effects in the upcoming RPG. Here’s a bit to get you started:

Making special effects for games is less glorious than making them for movies. Real-time playability forces the fx artist to limit the number and size of the particles. Making a 10-megaton nuclear explosion with about 50,000 particles, smoke clouds and debris or pieces of cattle flying around would result in a frame rate of about 0.0001 frames per second… But it could be a cool effect though.

In general, the particles are additive. This means that the color values of the pixels in the particle are added to the color values of the background. Particles that are too bright have a risk of losing all of their detail when added to each other, thus resulting in completely white spots.