Watch_Dogs E3 2012 Gas Station Explosion Mod

Discussion in 'Game Tweaks and Modifications' started by The Silver, Aug 4, 2017.

  1. AjGamer

    AjGamer Guest

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    Imma dip a little idea here quickly. I feel the reason the particles look so off is that they have no “realness” to them. They’re just 3d bits that fall through the floor as they come down. What if instead of many particle debris, we tried using fewer physical debris? This way the explosion feels more real because there’s actually matter produced by the explosion on the street and ground?
     
  2. HeySlickThatsMe

    HeySlickThatsMe Master Guru

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    2 Explosions and Distortion is present
    [​IMG]
    Red Smoke + Broken Sign + Tires
    [​IMG]
    Would there be any way to bring the Distortion back (i tried and no luck) and make the smoke red? I use the Steam pipe smoke because it looks like E3
     
  3. AjGamer

    AjGamer Guest

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    You could try to edit the smokes textures if possible, but the current black smoke still looks good.
     
  4. The Silver

    The Silver Guest

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    When you say that "the particles look so off" you are referring to what you saw and recorded in your video? Because in your video they looks so off due to the fact that HeySlickThatsMe edited my work and exaggerated the amount of debris (and the more the debris the more you notice them disappearing through the ground), however my file in the first post of this thread have an increased amount of debris compared to the vanilla game while still remaining fairly realistic.
    Anyway having real physical debris would be awesome, but there's a reason why they don't do that in videogames (most of the times they just fall through the ground), because usually the result isn't worth the significant performance hit (guess why they removed the old awesome E3 2012 Gas Station Explosion sequence?).
    What I'm trying to do now is to add only some debris with physics, along with all the other "ghost" debris, this is usually the best compromise. :)

    It seems that the E3 2012 explosion is actually the result of the two pumps exploding and mixing in a big fireball.
    Yeah I noticed that, and looking at the extremely well fitting fires that engulfs the 3d models of the gas station I would say that they were all hand placed 3d models, looking at the way the fire swirls and moves on these areas it looks like they used a fire texture that slides on an invisible model that fits the specific area of the gas station. Basically every little detail was scripted and handcrafted to suit exactly that specific cinematic, and nothing is left in the final game, not even the breakable sign etc. :(
    I don't think that it would be easy to bring back a convincing distortion, the fact that in the E3 2012 video it's so subtle means that we have not much reference to reacreate it and mostly that it's a very low priority considering how briefly it's seen.

    I agree, for both the fire and the smoke I think that a quick retexture is the most efficient way to check if this is the right path to improve the mod, or it's just better to leave them as is for now. ;)
     
    Last edited: Aug 8, 2017

  5. HeySlickThatsMe

    HeySlickThatsMe Master Guru

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    I tried changing the texture but the smoke was still black
     
  6. AjGamer

    AjGamer Guest

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    Yeah the major issue is that you just watch particles fall through the floor, having physical particles would be ideal but not everyone could run it (I’m spoiled by my 1080ti lmao) in any event I could just try seeing the hit of physical particles myself, I just gotta figure out how to add them
     
  7. HeySlickThatsMe

    HeySlickThatsMe Master Guru

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    I enabled the physics for these 2 big fires in Gas station explosion in the revival mod but i saw no difference , left it like that and it should be in 0.5 archive
     
  8. The Silver

    The Silver Guest

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    Physics for fire? Obviously it didn't work, because 2d particles have nothing to do with physics, the only particles that can be physical are the 3d models with havok (that's why there's the PhysicsGeometry= parameter that requires the path to the .hkr file of the 3d particle). ;)
     
    Last edited: Aug 8, 2017
  9. HeySlickThatsMe

    HeySlickThatsMe Master Guru

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    Oh , you are right
     
  10. AjGamer

    AjGamer Guest

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    So essentially slick’s edit is doing nothing unless you attach a particle to spawn as well?
     

  11. The Silver

    The Silver Guest

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    I don't know what are the specific edits that he made, what I know for sure is that enabling physics basically means that the particle will collide with the world, and to do so the particle must have a "presence" in the world, so it must have a .hkr file that defines it's collision shape (probably along with other properties).
     
  12. AjGamer

    AjGamer Guest

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    Ah ok, so he enabled the physical properties of the particle from the explosion, BUT a particle needs to be defined to use that property
     
  13. The Silver

    The Silver Guest

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    Making a particle "phisical" is not just enabling a simple magical flag Physics=1 that will turn everything in something awesome, you must actually define every property of the particle that is required by the physics engine (I don't know exactly how many things must be properly defined for the WD particle engine to process a physical particle).
    Usually a particle effect must have a 3d model and a collision model to have physics for example, while the "fire" is just a bunch of 2d planes with a translucent flame image on them, no 3d nor collision models involved.

    You guys should really try to documentate on the common basics of any generic particle engine, because besides being very interesting it would also save you a lot of questions and a lot of wasted time. :)
     
    Last edited: Aug 8, 2017

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