Fire

[Bucket]

How come game artists can't get fire right? It always looks bigger than it should be. To illustrate my point, let's take a look at a huge-ass fire:

Now, let's look at a small fire:

Obviously they move in similar ways; they're both fire. But you'll notice that the small fire (being small) flickers wildly, while the big fire (being big) has more billowy movements.

When I see fire in a video game, it almost invariably looks like the fire above. In reality, if molecules oxidized that slowly, we wouldn't see much more than a heathaze. Of course, we always see fires like the latter on torches (i.e. a single burning stick as opposed to a bunch of them) or even candles. They can't make it more obvious that they just watched some videos of giant bonfires and figured all fire looks like that.

Yeah, ten years ago everything was stylized or we had to make concessions because of limited resources. But today, it's just plain lazy. In an age where plain polycounts just don't cut it anymore, programmers and artists need to work together on better particle physics. Don't even get me started on fog... or shiny dirt...

[lupinx-Kassman]

Bucket said:

Don't even get me started on fog... or shiny dirt...

Or the bloom effect for that matter.

[EANB]

shiny dirt?

[AndrewB]

[leileilol]

Fire effects were good from 1995 to 2001 but in 2002 and beyond they just started to go to the crapper with 3 particles a second of lame fire. *COUGH*UT2k3*COUGH*NWN*COUGH*EVERYTHING MADE FOR CONSOLES*COUGH*

[AndrewB]

leileilol said:

Fire effects were good from 1995 to 2001 but in 2002 and beyond they just started to go to the crapper

K you know what I hate industry-wide lame attempts at graphics too but Jesus...



Can you say something that makes just a little bit of sense? It's all I ask.

[GooberMan]

Bucket said:

How come game artists can't get fire right?

It's not like they get anything else right.

Having said that, much like water, fire is rather hard to simulate in real time accurately. The best they can do is fake it.

[Fredrik]

Wet dirt can be shiny.

[AirRaid]

The problem with fire, is unlike water, cloth, bricks, sand, you CAN'T simulate it. You can model each of the things above based on various rules, fluid dynamics, etc. But fire is ever changing, and the visual effect you see when something is burning comes from the fluctuations in heat being given off. So you'd need to model a world basically down to the last atom, programming things like wind, ambient temperature, and not to mention each and every material that you wanted to burn.

There is no quick fix to make fire look realistic. It's probably THE hardest thing to do realistically. Movie studio have the same problem - I remember watching the making of the Fellowship of the Rings, one of the effects guys was talking about the amount of time they spent getting the fire for the Balrog right. It took them FOREVER to get it looking right. And they only needed to make it look good from the angle they wanted. Doing that in a game is a herculean task.

Game designers aren't being lazy. They're just skirting round what is basically an impossible task. Sure some game developers do a better job than others, but again, that's probably determined by budget and time alloances.

[Steeveeo]

I made a fire effect in GZDoom that looks almost exactly what came with the MD2 packs for Doomsday...

[kristus]

WAAAAAH! Why does game makers suck so much that they can't make light bounce properly?

[Inferno]

Sometimes they can do dust particles decent.

[leileilol]

maybe you're onto something

[Udderdude]

leileilol said:

maybe you're onto something

I'm convinced!

[Bucket]

Heh.

[AirRaid]

kristus said:

WAAAAAH! Why does game makers suck so much that they can't make light bounce properly?

People have been using raytracing for years. It's just too resource hungry for it to be properly viable yet. :P

(yes i know you were joking)