Coronas, etc.

[keiranhalcyon7]

In the mission files, lights are defined as part of the backdrop objects, are they not? There's no separating them (without more hooks); they're intentionally coupled.

[rogue518]

Awesome!! blue_max that would make missions tough and challenging to play with a sun hiding fighter's in your way....

Sincerely, Rogue518

[blue_max]

Well, this was far more difficult to enable in VR -- and I'm not even sure I did it right:

corona-11.jpg

This is more of a philosophical question: at what depth should the flare be placed? My understanding is that this is an optical phenomenon that happens inside the lens of a camera. So it's "depth" would be very close to the image plane. However, doing that in VR is... weird, because you have a distant object with a "detached" flare that is right in your face. It's not comfortable and doesn't make sense. So I put the flare at infinity... because. At this point I think I'm going to leave it there; but I'm wondering how this problem is solved in professional VR games.

[Ace Antilles]

[darklord]

I always thought lens flare was a phenomenon that happens on glass. Like the lens of a camera or glass of a cockpit. Especially a bubble one. But honestly that looks so awesome, I don't really care.

[blue_max]

Yeah, it probably makes more sense to place the lens flare at cockpit-glass-depth. Also, I was reading about lens flare in VR and a lot of people don't like it anyway. Good thing I already have an "off" switch for that.

[Trevor]

there are 2 lens flare phenome - halos/glare and the coloured circles/hexagons

the first can be caused by any lens, glass or organic (eye)

the second is explicit to cameras with multiple lenses inside and the circles reflect the shape of the aperture (hence sometimes hexagon or any n-gon) and the number of lenses.

XWA for example assumes a camera with a circular aperture (non-variable) and 6 lenses (or 3 with reflections I think)

So, VR shouldn't have the second one, but I agree they look awsome and I would enable them at infinite distance (though technically, if we were viewing through an imax camera the flares would be at 0 since they happen inside the camera on each set of lenses)

Trev

[keiranhalcyon7]

They manifest inside the camera's optics, so technically they should be generated independently for each image.

Because these light sources are at infinity, the independently-generated flares should come out the same, and you can just generate them once. But if you were to generate flares for a more nearby light source, the resulting flares would have different angles. This would be accurate if you were simulating looking out of the cockpit through MK's eyes, but if you're simulating a human's eyes, lens flares wouldn't appear.

[blue_max]

Because these light sources are at infinity, the independently-generated flares should come out the same, and you can just generate them once.

Sadly, this is only true for parallel, forward-looking, symmetric cameras. There are VR headsets like the Pimax that have canted displays so each image is quite different even for objects placed at infinity. In general, we can't make these assumptions when working in SteamVR... which is kind of annoying because everything has to be rendered twice and these tricks can't be applied.

The rest is quite true, though. Thanks for your insights, keiranhalcyon7 and Trevor!

[keiranhalcyon7]

Dang, you're right, and parallel cameras does describe my thought experiment. Good catch.

[rogue518]

And will this be available soon?

Sinserely, Rogue518

[blue_max]

And will this be available soon?

May the Force be with you!

[ual002]

Cheeky bugger.

[rogue518]

Lol I thought I give it a shot...

Sincerely, Rogue518

[korekwerner]

this is the thing that was missing in XWA. Now, as I see, the game will be complete ... well, maybe it could use better explosion effects (loaded from an external file with a random element).
BlueMax you are destroying the system.
Thank you.

[blue_max]

And will this be available soon?

May the Force be with you!

Released today, May the Fourth; in version 1.1.3. Look in the downloads section.