i am trying to create large areas of particle meshes, to use as kind of… organic moving scenery that will respond to a user.
am not sure about how to ‘join’ paticles and can only have a huge lot of individual particles that respond individually… anyideas how i can have particals interacting with one another.
Hi John,
thats not the thing openGL will do for you. You have to calculate this for yourself. Maybe you find algorithms on physics pages in the net. Metaballs give also a organic feeling.
Wanna see this in Quake IV, John >;-)
[This message has been edited by Kilam Malik (edited 08-10-2000).]
You don’t really think this is really John Carmack of Id Software do you?
he’s fooling with you
You don’t really think this is really John Carmack of Id Software do you?
he’s fooling with you
Sounds like maybe a flocking system would do what you want? I have no idea how they work, but it sounds like a flock of particles reacting to each other as well as the user could maybe produce behaviors you are looking for. A net search on flocking algorithms would probably turn something up.
Hey, I made no claims about being from id or not. You came to that conclusion yourselves… maybe i am, maybe not. The fact is, i need to do these particle meshes, and i (and those helping me) are having problems creating genuine looking particle movement relative to other particles. Thanks for the flocking tip BTW we are looking into it. Oh and for the guy who mentioned Quake 4… if you keep up with id then youll know doom 3 is the new project 
JC
I think Kilam is right. From what you describe, maintaining a ‘flock’ of particles still requires that each particle be its own element, as opposed to a tris in a mesh. You could still dynamically modify/regen the mesh after every frame, placing each particle into a display list before rendering, but you’ll still have to handle the interaction/processing of each particle on its own.
Metaballs would provide suitable results, but the processing for each particle still has to be done. In which case, you might as well make them autonomous and keep the results unique.
I´m not the real John C. by the way…
Schlogenburg:
Wasn’t that smile in my post a devil, ironic smile? Did you really think I believed it???