I am trying to create an explosion and/or fire affect in VB.NET. Does
anyone have code or a link to help me out with this. Thanks.

John

You will be much better off with real-time effects such as fire and explosions
by using DirectX and more for your language, Managed DirectX. Real-time
particle effects generally require some beefy operations that render over a
large portion of the screen in rather quick updates, which aren't suited well
towards GDI+.

That said, procedural fire might not be the way you want to go. You can always
try running an animated gif of a pre-rendered fire effect. You can do the same
for an explosion. If you really wanted to add some effects you could trace some
particles at random vectors over top of the animation. Another trick to
explosions
is simply rotating the effect as long as the explosion is non-uniform.

Blending multiple effects using an alpha channel can also make for some
interesting
and unique looking explosions or fire effects.

Well, that is a useless post for the day I guess, since I'm not sure I really
helped you
all that much. The point here would be to go for pre-canned animations and live
with
those. Many 3D games today still use pre-canned effects for fire and explosions
because of the intense code required to handle real-time effects of this nature.
They
use tricks like blending and random particles to achieve more uniqueness.

--
Justin Rogers
DigiTec Web Consultants, LLC.
Blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/justin_rogers


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