For a game with explosive devices in the title, BombSquad’s explosions have always been pretty tame; really nothing more than glowy orange spheres that pop in for a moment, grow, and then disappear. I finally got around to pimping them out a bit though… I find one of the keys to a neat looking explosion is to just add *lots* of random different stuff.. some sparks, some rocks, some smoke, some distortion, some scorching, etc. Here, Spaz is kind enough to demonstrate some of the improvements for us:
Holy macaroni! Those look awesome!
this real time explosion rendering is really remarkable! smoke and the expanding effect especially.
Thanks! The trick with the smoke was to render it as little strips of polygons with a fancy smoke shader attached, and to let the vertices drift apart over time to get the expanding/distoring look. Hit F11 in the game to go into debug-drawing mode and see how it works.