This week we had to work with terrains. I remember working with them before so texturing and height mapping them was pretty easy. But then we also worked on particle effects and skyboxes. Skyboxes are always hard to deal with because the player can get to the edge of the map or see into the void if the sky isn't connected to land. But I came up with a pretty simple and fast solution. Seeing as to how we don't have to make anything fancy, I decided that cliffs would make it easy to hide the void from the player. So the player enters into a medium amount of land surrounded by cliffs. This makes it much easier to work with the boundaries of the map.
In a normal map that couldn't use such a simple blocking plan, I would have to have the land stop the player before coming to close to the edge. It could be done with a bunch of bushes and trees, as well as some other unnatural building. Some fog and foliage would help to hide the back walls of the skybox as well. No doubt things like this will have to be dealt with in the course project seeing as to how it's outside.
As for particle effect work, I didn't remember any work with them if I have done any. They seemed pretty simple and fast to make. But they add a lot to the game. I wish I could put lots and lots of effects in the maps because they do a very good job of making realistic map effects. But that would likely slow down gameplay. Which reminds me that I may not have been the easiest with the amount of stuff in my map. I fear I would have a harder time feeling the effects of the particles and graphics because my computer is so powerful. I know the effects of these kinds of computer differences from moving games that worked fine to the school computers to find that they are unbearably slow.
One problem I ran into when working on my rain particle effect, was that the lifetime I had given it caused it to have a odd delay. I guess it was the effect of the rain falling to the point that the particle max would be reached and the rain would wait for deleting to respawn. I had to fix it by lowering the lifetime, which worked pretty well and made the particles have no delay when respawning.
