Effects Feedback Thread (Spells ,Waterfalls ,Falling leaves ect.)

Love the FX for the most part, keep up the good work.

Got one problem though. Act 2 at the female bandit (akira? asira?) The FX on her little cauldron are causing massive FPS drops. I'm running steady 63 fps everywhere else in the game (3rd gen I5 processor 3.1ghz, geforce 550, 16 gigs of ram) Even after killing that bandit woman and all her minions, just walking over close enough for cauldron to show up on screen causes instant FPS hit.

nice :D

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thanoz wrote:

Love the FX for the most part, keep up the good work.

Got one problem though. Act 2 at the female bandit (akira? asira?) The FX on her little cauldron are causing massive FPS drops. I'm running steady 63 fps everywhere else in the game (3rd gen I5 processor 3.1ghz, geforce 550, 16 gigs of ram) Even after killing that bandit woman and all her minions, just walking over close enough for cauldron to show up on screen causes instant FPS hit.

Hmm I just checked it and there's nothing laggy going on in the FX end. I have got a good pc though so its hard to say if it is laggy or not but I don't see anything wrong with it. Theres no mass amount of particles or big see through particles to eat fill rate.

So im not sure how to help man : /

I had reported the Alira Firepit FPS drop before. It comes and goes through various patches, but it's almost certainly related to some dicey shadow calculations.

Some of the spells look really good. I love how fireball wreaths around my character as I cast. I use lighting arrow on my ranger to see the cool effect even though she's specced for physical damage. LOL! I saw you mentioned earlier in the thread that you might rework fireball and I really hope you keep the effect with the little dots of fire ringing my character and merging into the cast. I always play fire-hurling mage types in games and I've never seen something that pretty before. The burning effect on mobs when I ignite things looks good too.

Firestorm is not as much to my taste. The falling fireballs go so fast they turn into streaks, so I don't get a sense of a rain of fireballs. If I could make a suggestion I'd love to see how it looks with the rain falling a little slower so you can see the fireballs raining down. It also lacks ground feedback to let you know what area you're hitting and whether you need to cast a second time to hit everything. I'd like to see either a reddish ground glow under the storm, maybe even with a slight outline, or at least a lingering effect from the falling fireballs.

Thanks for your consideration.

good effects

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pneuma wrote:

I had reported the Alira Firepit FPS drop before. It comes and goes through various patches, but it's almost certainly related to some dicey shadow calculations.

Confirming it, had that problem on few patches i played, running Radeon 4890 on Legacy drivers 12.6.

Steady 60 fps throughout the whole game and in only few areas i have drop to CONSTANT 30-32 fps. Alira place, i think Pools or other dark forest area also had this problem.

First, I want to state a complement for the animation of ice nova. In most other games the animation is very fast and in the case of electricity you would expect this, but a slower nova for ice just looks more powerful and impressive. But I think it would be perfect if the animation would be a bit slower (maybe stretched about 0,2s longer?), that wouldn't make any real difference in the handling. Personally, I would remove some green from the colour of the nova.
Also the burning area of the fire trap looks quite impressive if outside of your light radius in dark instances.

I have two more suggestions to make the corresponding spells look a bit more powerful with just a minimum effort:

Fire Storm:
The projectiles should leave a fading reddish mild glow on the ground, to emphasize the heat of the projectiles. Optional this effect could stack (up to a limited intensity) if someone is spam-casting it on a single point.

Shock Nova:
After casting the nova, some tiny tiny sparks that sparkle shortly on the ground in the covered area of the nova would do quite well I think.

Hey

Im personally not much of a fan myself of frost nova because its so slow and doesn't work so well in different lighting environments. Im glad your happy with it though.

The reason fire storm and other spells dont leave things on the ground is because we dont have animated decals yet. I would love explosives spells to leave chard and burnt smoldering patches as an after math. We just cant do it yet.

However I can do what you asked with lightning nova ez pz.

Ill chuck some sparks in once im done with the current thing im on. Wont take long.

Poison arrow continues to be a massive framerate hit on very powerful cards, as does rain, ground fire/tar, and the fetid pool/bog effect.

Poison arrow is the worst, the others are just bad in a combination, but poison arrow does it all by itself.