Ambient FX
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Ambient FX is a side project I've been working on for the last few weeks. This mod will seek to enhance effects used across the game in a very natural way. In the first rendition that will be released tomorrow I have enhanced fire/smoke/smog effects. These effects (both looped and non looped particle effects) will apply to ALL vehicles, not just the players. Smoke trails can now be seen blocks away, fire and embers effects have been enhanced, and a neat smog effect that grows depending on the amount of vehicles on fire as well being contained to that given area only. I will be open to ideas and reasonable suggestions so please feel free to leave a comment. Keep in mind that most of my time is dedicated to RDE and so this is just a side project I cooked up.
Here's some more eye candle. For disclosure all of these screens were taken with a completely vanilla install. I cant wait to see them with VisualV installed.
For those curious about performance. I have a fairly old processor (AMD Phenom X4) and if there's a fps loss its unnoticeable to me and those I've had testing.
Here's a video of it in action:
Released:
https://www.gta5-mods.com/scripts/ambient-fx
http://www.lcpdfr.com/files/file/16144-ambient-fx/
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Man, this looks awesome and the kind of next-gen dynamic I wish games at large would adopt.
Also now I can relive my favourite Steel Frontier line in GTAV;
"You and I watched the world catch fire, we saw the sun eclipse from the smoke of burning flesh!"
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I wonder how much performance it will eat lol.
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@cyberzone2 I demonstrated destroying a parking lot of cars in the video above without any performance issues. It runs really well, better than I thought it would when I initially started scripting it. If I were to guess an estimated fps loss I guess it to be between none to just a few and thats if you took out the entire highway. The way I have done the checking of vehicles around the player doesn't seem to eat up any performance. But like anything else, I'm sure if you had 20+ burning vehicles at once you'll lose something.
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@Dilapidated It's just amazing, I love that kind of mods
Great work!
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@Dilapidated This looks really cool, I love this kind of mod.
A good performance test for this would be one of my favourite sadistic pastimes
... and also partly how I tested my helicopter effects in the city. Find a busy bridge over a busy highway and toss proximity mines onto the highway below. What that creates is a flow of traffic behind you on the bridge, that isn't part of the effect and a rapid flow of vehicles below, that could/will be part of the effect.It gets your checking code flooded with a constantly changing set of vehicles, so it's a good benchmark scenario. One of the locations I used had a constant flow of around 130 - 150 vehicles, so that really pushes things to the extremes.
Nice job.. will be definitely be keeping an eye on this one.
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@Reyser Thank you for the kind words! Can't wait to release this tomorrow after work
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@LeeC2202 Thanks Lee, I appreciate your comments and suggestions. I think from my testing and the beta group I have looking into this the biggest FPS dips are due to the sheer amount of FX effects being on the screen at the same time (Example: taking out an entire highway all at once) and not so much from the checking side of the code but multiple effects on screen at once. I'm not sure if the playing of multiple effects at once aspect can be enhanced further but I will do everything I can to squeeze out the best performance possible.
What I did to improve the checking side of code is via making this script multi-threaded. I have the vehicle pool off to itself in a thread to be checked once every 2000 ms instead of on tick. I figure with that range you'd have to be going insanely fast for it have any drawbacks and at which case you probably wouldn't be blowing stuff up/burning vehicles anyway and even if so it would eventually catch up anyway.
VehiclePool = World.GetNearbyVehicles(Me.Player.Character.Position, 300f);I then use a mixture of LINQ and Lamda functions to iterate over this list when specific conditions are met. In this manner the 300f range check doesn't seem to affect performance. Having said that, this is my first solo script as I primarily work within a team and so I'm sure I could probably enhance some aspects of the mod and I'm very open to ideas.
I have a great deal of respect for you with the mods and work you've put out and so I'll take your advice and suggestions in high regards. Can't wait to share more when I can!
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@Dilapidated Wohohoho this is now beyond epic,I feel like putting on my smoke mask on in front of my screen now
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Did some stress testing while also showing off some of the new effects for you guys.
Here's the daytime effects:
And my personal favorite the night effects:
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@Dilapidated said in Ambient FX:
What I did to improve the checking side of code is via making this script multi-threaded. I have the vehicle pool off to itself in a thread to be checked once every 2000 ms instead of on tick.
That's a very good idea... I don't understand multi-threading, (or LINQ or Lambda functions for that matter) my brain rejects any attempts to understand it.
It is interesting though because I think many people shy away from multi-threading because the SHVDN team said that you couldn't make any API calls from threads.I think it's the iteration/checking that causes the hit more than the collection process, so you've targeted exactly the right spot and are clearly benefiting from that. I'd kill for a programmer's brain sometimes.
The videos look great btw.
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@Dilapidated This looks fantastic. More awesomeness for GTA V. Can't wait to see this in action
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@Dilapidated @krissboo @LeeC2202 @Elope Mod Approved. Have fun!
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@Reyser Nice!!! I should be out in the sun, but new mods mean it's GTA time
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This is modestly put, way beyond the realm of what I even dared to think was possible. It's like you are mainlining secret sauce into the heart of the game engine.
Simply astonishing.
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I'd like to get some ideas for the next set of effects.
It doesn't have to be strictly vehicle related and could be ped related (example: I'd be fine with touching up on the blood / gore effects)
So if you have an idea or suggestion just drop it here. Just keep in mind my intentions are to create effects that 'fit' over the game naturally. (example: removing the plane/jet afterburners with something more visually stunning like the booster rocket)
Oh and I'm totally not working on gore or booster rocket effects. Nope
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How about an expansion of this to affect non-vehicle related ground fires as well? Since the game has a fire propagation system (that's just kind of gimped in vanilla but can be unlocked by tweaking fireFX.dat) it would make for some visually amazing forest etc. fires.
Or a variaton that would spawn FEAR-style lingering dust clouds from heavy gunfire. There's something like this in interior areas at the moment but the effect is not very strong and outside of story missions there are rarely any indoor shootouts.
Loving the effect so far btw.
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@Dilapidated Can you do something like the blood spurt effect from GTA IV?
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longer fire and higher smoke trail ?
it reminds me BF4
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great job the smoke is awesome
make the smoke even bigger & going higher into the sky so you can see it from a mile away
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Sneak peak at what will be coming next...
Proper afterburners! No more silly purple flames!
And yes, again this is for all vehicles... not just the players
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I will try to extend the smoke effect if possible in future updates. Currently the smoke is set to be seen at a distance of 3000f. So if you teleported you should be able to see it from a mile away. The issue is that the game puts these vehicles out itself once you're far away however the smoke effects still linger for a few seconds.
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@Ehetyz Position based, Object based, and Ped based effects are planned. We'll try to push things as far as I can
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@Stryfaar There's quite a few blood fx effects I'm looking into currently. I'm not sure which one I'll use just yet though.
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I will be away starting tomorrow until the 16th. Feel free to post and I will reply when I get a chance. Just wanted to give you guys a heads up.
