Rocket Smoke Test

May 23, 2012 by Terry

So an email arrived from this guy Grant with a whole bunch of good ideas for Retrobooster. Among them, he suggested there should be smoke coming out of the player’s ship. Thanks, Grant.

In the video you can see the rocket smoke deflecting off of surfaces. That’s done with some very crude particle forces that are carefully placed when you fire your rockets. It would be great to do a full-blown fluid dynamics simulation, but that’s just too computationally expensive. I hope players will be too busy playing the game to worry about little flaws in the way the smoke moves.

Right now I can’t decide if I want to keep so much smoke; it seems sort of overdone. At the least, I think it should be used when the ship is damaged. Or maybe there should be a tight stream of gray smoke when the ship is healthy and a lot of sputtering black smoke when it isn’t. I’ll probably just keep it like this for a while and see what people think.

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