The Bard’s Tale Developer Diary #12

In GameSpy’s twelfth installment to their Bard’s Tale developer diary, InXile’s senior software engineer Mike Winfield details several enhancements that have been made to particle effects in the game. A snippet:

Another improvement was spurred by a problem we programmers faced as a team. According to the game design, time stops whenever an artifact character makes an entrance. This provided the typical headache of allowing some game objects to continue processing while others were essentially stopped dead in their tracks, but at a lower level, this also meant particle effects associated with the artifact characters had to continue to run while the particle effects attached to other game objects had to remain frozen in time. This seemed daunting at first because time was global to all particle systems. However, once the PS2 VU code was enhanced to provide a unique time reference for each particle system, we were able to meet our goals for the character entrances. This same technique also enabled us to use active particles in our pause menu while the rest of the game particles remained paused.