Month: February 2009

Lightning Bolts

You’re flying your ship down a cavern, dodging and weaving through enemy fire.  It’s becoming rapidly apparent, however, that you’re outmatched.  So, desperate to survive, you flip The Switch.  Yes, that switch.  The one that you reserve for those…special occasions.  Your ship charges up and releases bolt after deadly bolt of lightning into your opponents, devastating the entire enemy fleet.

At least, that’s the plan.

But how do you, the game developer, RENDER such an effect?

Lightning Is Fractally Right

As it turns out, generating lightning between two endpoints can be a deceptively simple thing to generate.  It can be generated as an L-System (with some randomization per generation).  Some simple pseudo-code follows: (note that this code, and really everything in this article, is geared towards generating 2D bolts; in general, that’s all you should need…in 3D, simply generate a bolt such that it’s offset relative to the camera’s view plane.  Or you can do the offsets in the full three dimensions, it’s your choice)

segmentList.Add(new Segment(startPoint, endPoint));
offsetAmount = maximumOffset; // the maximum amount to offset a lightning vertex.
for each generation (some number of generations)
  for each segment that was in segmentList when this generation started
    segmentList.Remove(segment); // This segment is no longer necessary.

    midPoint = Average(startpoint, endPoint);
    // Offset the midpoint by a random amount along the normal.
    midPoint += Perpendicular(Normalize(endPoint-startPoint))*RandomFloat(-offsetAmount,offsetAmount);

    // Create two new segments that span from the start point to the end point,
    // but with the new (randomly-offset) midpoint.
    segmentList.Add(new Segment(startPoint, midPoint));
    segmentList.Add(new Segment(midPoint, endPoint));
  end for
  offsetAmount /= 2; // Each subsequent generation offsets at max half as much as the generation before.
end for

Essentially, on each generation, subdivide each line segment into two, and offset the new point a little bit.  Each generation has half of the offset that the previous had.

So, for 5 generations, you would get:

lightningstage2lightningstage3lightningstage4lightningstage5lightningstage6

That’s not bad.  Already, it looks at least kinda like lightning.  It has about the right shape.  However, lightning frequently has branches: offshoots that go off in other directions.

To do this, occasionally when you split a bolt segment, instead of just adding two segments (one for each side of the split), you actually add three.  The third segment just continues in roughly the first segment’s direction (with some randomization thrown in)

direction = midPoint - startPoint;
splitEnd = Rotate(direction, randomSmallAngle)*lengthScale + midPoint; // lengthScale is, for best results, < 1.  0.7 is a good value.
segmentList.Add(new Segment(midPoint, splitEnd));

Then, in subsequent generations, this, too, will get divided.  It’s also a good idea to make these splits dimmer.  Only the main lightning bolt should look fully-bright, as it’s the only one that actually connects to the target.

Using the same divisions as above (and using every other division), it looks like this:

lightningsplitstage2lightningsplitstage4lightningsplitstage6Now that looks a little more like lightning!  Well..at least the shape of it.  But what about the rest?

Adding Some Glow

Initially, the system designed for Procyon used rounded beams.  Each segment of the lightning bolt was rendered using three quads, each with a glow texture applied (to make it look like a rounded-off line).  The rounded edges overlapped, creating joints.  This looked pretty good:

lightningtest

..but as you can see, it tended to get quite bright.  It only got brighter, too, as the bolt got smaller (and the overlaps got closer together).  Trying to draw it dimmer presented additional problems: the overlaps became suddenly VERY noticeable, as little dots along the length of the bolt.  Obviously, this just wouldn’t do.  If you have the luxury of rendering the lightning to an offscreen buffer, you can render the bolts using max blending (D3DBLENDOP_MAX) to the offscreen buffer, then just blend that onto the main scene to avoid this problem.  If you don’t have this luxury, you can create a vertex strip out of the lightning bolt by creating two vertices for each generated lighting point, and moving each of them along the 2D vertex normals (normals are perpendicular to the average of the directions two line segments that meet at the current vertex).

That is, you get something like this:

lightningvertices

Animation

This is the fun part.  How do you animate such a beast?

As with many things in computer graphics, it requires a lot of tweaking.  What I found to be useful is as follows:

Each bolt is actually TWO bolts at a time.  In this case every 1/3rd of a second, one of the bolts expires, but each bolt’s cycle is 1/6th of a second off.  That is, at 60 frames per second:

  • Frame 0: Bolt1 generated at full brightness
  • Frame 10: Bolt1 is now at half brightness, Bolt2 is generated at full brightness
  • Frame 20: A new Bolt1 is generated at full, Bolt2 is now at half brightness
  • Frame 30: A new Bolt2 is generated at full, Bolt1 is now at half brightness
  • Frame 40: A new Bolt1 is generated at full, Bolt2 is now at half brightness
  • Etc…

Basically, they alternate.  Of course, just having static bolts fading out doesn’t work very well, so every frame it can be useful to jitter each point just a tiny bit (it looks fairly cool to jitter the split endpoints even more than that, it makes the whole thing look more dynamic).  This gives:

And, of course, you can move the endpoints around…say, if you happen to have your lightning targetting some moving enemies:

So that’s it!  Lightning isn’t terribly difficult to render, and it can look super-cool when it’s all complete.

Collision Detection Performance (Volume 2)

Yikes, I’m getting backlogged on the stuff I want to write about!  <Insert generic complaint about how work is eating up most of my time here>

Anyway, this will probably be way shorter than it deserves, but my memory on the subject is about 3 months old.  Basically, this will be more or less a short chronicle of the dumb story of the mesh vs. mesh tests.

Appearances Can Be And Are Frequently Deceiving

When I started work on the collision detection observation, there was one surprising fact: the mesh vs. mesh code (used to determine whether the player was intersecting enemy ships) was working at full speed!  I didn’t seem to have to do any optimization at all on it to get it working.

I did, however, opt to go ahead and change the functions to not be recursive (as the current implementation was, of course, recursing into both meshes’ sphere trees).  When I finished that work, suddenly, the routine was much, much slower.  Was, in this case, the recursion overhead better than what it took to handle the double tree recursion in a non-recursive way?

The Answer May Surprise You

While I was working out the kinks in the non-recursive version, I had added some visual feedback to display unambiguously when the meshes were colliding.  While experimenting, I reverted back to the old (recursive) method, and found out something surprising: the collision results weren’t accurate!  It was reporting collision in cases where the player was inside of the object’s space, but nowhere near any edges!

Turns out, there was an erroneous fall-through case, and it was falling through to a “true” result, causing the entire collision test to short-circuit with an invalid collision result.  Sure the original routine was fast, but it didn’t work at ALL.  Now that I’d fixed that and had an accurate version, it was super, super slow.  Now it became an imperative to optimize.

Double Dribble

Through the course of optimizing the routine, I tried all sorts of crazy stuff.  I eliminated the recursion, I tried AABB vs. Rotated AABB tests, I tried Sphere vs. AABB tests, etc.  There was nothing that I could do.  As I was stepping through the code, however, I started noticing something odd: there were duplicate triangles all over the place.  I would see the same triangle tens of times in a given collision test.

As it turns out, the way I was dividing up the mesh in the tree creation routine was boneheaded.  What I would do was as follows:

  1. If the current set of triangles has less than a specified number of entries, stop splitting the mesh, we’ve reached a leaf node.
  2. Figure out the bounding box of the current set of triangles
  3. Find the axis on which it was best to split the set of triangles (where best was determined as the most balanced split, i.e. where the difference between triangle counts on the left and right of the split was lowest)
  4. For each triangle
    1. If the triangle has a vertex to the left of the split, add it to the left side.
    2. If the triangle has a vertex to the right of the split, add it to the right side.
  5. Once the mesh is divided into the two sets, recurse into each set to split it further as necessary

Now, a cursory analysis of this algorithm should tell you that step 4 is horribly broken.  If a triangle straddles the split, it would get added into both sides, thus expanding the bounding boxes of each sub element to encompass all triangles that straddle the split, causing there to be tons of duplicates of the same triangles throughout the code.

The correct way to do it would be:

  1. If the current set of triangles has less than a specified number of entries, stop splitting the mesh, we’ve reached a leaf node.
  2. Figure out the bounding box of the current set of triangles
  3. Find the axis on which it was best to split the set of triangles (where best was determined as the most balanced split, i.e. where the difference between triangle counts on the left and right of the split was lowest)
  4. For each triangle
    1. Calculate the centroid of the triangle (i.e. average the 3 vertices).
    2. If the centroid is less than the split, add the triangle to the left, OTHERWISE add it to the right.
  5. Once the mesh is divided into the two sets, recurse into each set to split it further as necessary

There, now a triangle only gets added to the side that it’s MOSTLY on, and there are no duplicates.  This change greatly boosted the speed of the collision, however there were cases where it would still cause a framerate dip.  Curses and drat!

All the King’s Horses…

Try as I might, I could not get the mesh vs. mesh intersection test to perform well.  So what happened when you get into a situation like that?  You do what every game developer does: you cheat!

What existed at the time was a wicked fast sphere vs. mesh collision test.  So rather than treat the player ship as a mesh, I opted to treat it as a representative collection of spheres (There are 29 spheres total, and it’s a pretty good approximation of the player ship – in fact, it’s probably better than necessary).

Suddenly, player vs. enemy collision performance was great!  Since this was the only place that I had needed a mesh vs. mesh, I could get rid of that slow beast.

~fin~

All of the collision code is complete, now, so next (give or take a post or two) I’ll talk about something with a bit more of a visual element – Bolts of lightning!