Over on BluesNews.com there is great news for any SoF2 and JK2 mod developers!
So this info and tools should help any SoF2 and JK2 mapper and mod team!Pat Lipo's .plan responds to requests they've received for some basic documentation and samples that can be used for weather effects and "vertigons (surfacesprites)" for authors of modifications and/or maps for JK2 and SoF2.
By popular request, I put together some basic documentation and samples that can be used for weather effects and vertigons (surfacesprites) for people making mods and/or maps for JK2 and SOF2.
Rick Johnson's worldeffects system has some calls for creating in-view rain and snow, as well as misty-foggy stuff. These can be added to maps by adding commands to the worldspawn.
My vertigon system is used to add grass, shrubbery, vines, mist, and rain splashes to a surface with culling at a distance. It's really easy to do, it merely requires editing the shader of whatever surface you wish to add vertigons to. The system is pretty cheap for what it does, and we only scratched the surface of its potential while making SOF2 and JK2.
Both technologies are more or less synchronized between JK2SP, JK2MP, SOF2SP, and SOF2MP, so the documents and sample shaders are more or less transferable. The only thing SOF2 has that JK2 doesn't are some additional directives for gore and the like. Using the improvements you can do sprites on people as well as terrain polygons, such as placing rain-splashes on the dudes with the rain slickers (I was a bit too busy with my other project to squeeze that into the liner level, darn it).
The vertigons were also used in SOF2 for projecting gore on
characters. For some simple examples, SOF2MP mod-makers can add new gore decals (both 2D and 3D) by working with the module cg_gore.c.The file for all this goodness can be found at my goofy little Cyclones Cinematic Shrine.
For those of you who would rather eat glass than be subjected to the horrors that were the Cyclones cinematics, the direct link to the file is here
Happy splattering! And raining... And grassing... And misting...
--Pat