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Hi all,
Allow me to say that Im still not a trusted member even though I bought the license (could a MOD fix this please?) so my posts wont be reflected on main board, so if you are wondering if there is any new posts from me you better come into this thread and check out otherwise you will never know.

Now to the main issue I have found, Im trying to build some particles here using textured plain objects ghosted, but Im trying to slowly fade them as their lifetime comes to an end, I have managed that well using dbFadeObject command, but I have noticed that while those plains are affected by lights they dont look as good as I wanted, but setting the lights to not affect them makes dbFadeObject effect not noticeable, I have seen in the documentation that fading a object is related to the light it reflects, and that makes sense then, but isnt there another way to make a object slowly dissapear? Im open to any idea or suggestion, thanks.

I dont know for certain, but you could try playing around with the objects specular, ambient etc values to see if they make a difference or not.

You could try transparency flags or texture filters.. you could maybe use some sort of shader effect on them(unless you dont want shaders) to make them look how you like, using a shader would probably give you more control over the light/lights affecting them, but could also be a slowdown for things like particles.

Anyway, here are some GDK Object commands that may or may not be useful for this :



The dbUpdateGhostLayer command will affect all objects that are ghosted, ive not used it, but if it works in a similar way to the other "updatexxx" commands that GDK has(eg. dbUpdateParticles() ) then the global update is what it will do(updating their data before the sync basically, so that when it does sync it's performing more than one operation... it can cause slowdown, especially with the particles ones lol, but its the only way to render more that one particle emission position per particle object in a single render loop-with GDK particles)

edit : fixed accidental smileys lol

Thanks Mista Wilson for the ideas, following your suggestions I have tried all those commands (think I tried all available flags too), but I still cant get this too work properly. I think Im not using shaders in this to avoid performance hit as you said.

The main thing that I see wrong in my particles is that they look different from different angles, thats because of the main light of course, so in certain angles they seem too white and in others too dark, I would be happy with any of the aspects all the time, thats why I thought making all lights avoid those particles should work, but I cant combine this with any kind of fading effect, any other ideas?

Edit: I forgot to ask... what does dbUpdateGhostLayer do? I have looked into documentation and nothing came out, I know search through documentation is not the best search engine ever lol, but I looked into the main index where all commands are listed and I cant see it