Help - questions that need answers

[steelbread]

I am working in an ambitious project inspired by silent hill but there are a few questions I need answered first.

1. Particle effects - How do I make my own? How do I implement them?

2. Post processing effects (such as noise or a an animated fuzz effect over the screen) - Any ideas as to how I could go about implementing this?

Thanks in advance.

[Rachael]

1. Realm667 is a site that among many things has an SFX shoppe that has plenty of particle effect abusers. With some knowledge of decorate, it's fairly easy to create your own free floating/fading effects, and by looking at these you can learn about how they are done. Just remember one thing, though: neither ZDoom nor GZDoom will handle these too well, if you put like 500 torches in a map, you're not going to end up with a playable map. If you're careful with how you code it though, and can sneak every actor past the physics and thinker systems (by using +NOINTERACTION), you can significantly reduce the processing time required on these actors and squeeze in a few more than were ever previously possible.

2. This can be done with the use of custom shaders. There is little to no documentation available about these, though, so you're on your own figuring out how this works. Maybe somebody like Graf can get you pointed in the right direction at least, though.

[Gez]

Hardware shaders on the ZDoom wiki
There is little documentation because what you get is direct access to GLSL (though with strict constraints), so the documentation about it ought to be actual GLSL documentation, which would be out of the ZDoom wiki's scope. So there's a prototype, an example, and a link to the official GLSL doc.