Tutorial #1: Fire effect
, ,
/ \/ \
(/ //_ \_
.-._ \|| . \
\ '-._ _,:__.-"/---\_ \
______/___ '. .--------------------'~-'--.)_,( , )\ \
`'--.___ _\ / | DarK I ,' \)|\ `\|
/___.-' \ \ _:,_ Tutorial #1: Fire effect " || (
.'__ _.'\ '-/,`-~` |/
\ ___.> /=,| http://www.multimania.com/darki |
/ _.-'/_ ) | email:darki@multimania.com |
/` ( /(/ |_________________________________|
\\ " Ascii art by Shanaka Dias (snd)
'=='Introduction
This is the first tutorial (of many I hope) on programming various 2d and 3d effects. I am starting off with the standard fire effect. Often enough, people who write tutorials start with stuff about mode 13h, palettes, etc ... by I figure that there is already plenty enough stuff out there on those topics.
Before you start reading, maybe you will want to download fire.zip from my homepage (unless you already have) and look at it and the code. Just so we know what we are talking about here ;) If you feel that the code is somewhat obscure (I think it is ...) well then read on!
Part I: Generating a cool palette
The first thing your program will have to do, (after setting up video mode and such) is to create a cool palette for the fire. This turns out to be a crucial part of the effectiveness of the effect.
To look good, the palette must contain a smooth gradient of colors that range from white to black, passing by reds, oranges, yellows and maybe some blues for the top of the fire. As we will see later on, the order of colors is important. The palette should look like this:
____________________
|Color 0 | Black |
| . | |
| . | |
| . | |
|Color n1 | Blue |
| . | |
| . | |
| . | |
|Color n2 | Red |
| . | |
|Color n3 | Orange|
| . | |
|Color n4 | Yellow|
| . | |
|Color 255 | White |
|__________|_______|The higher the color index is, the 'hotter' the pixel is. So at the bottom of the fire everything is white, then it gradually decreases to black.
The trick is to have smooth color runs between the various colors at indexes 0, n1, n2, ... so that the whole thing looks smooth. And the key to smooth color runs is: LINEAR INTERPOLATION. Remember this one if you haven't already its one of those things that you will often need in programming (especially graphics programming). If you already know what this is and are comfortable with it, just skip a paragraph or two. Its a really simple formula and has an incredible number of applications. Here it goes:
Value = Start_Value + t * (End_Value - Start_Value)
where t varies from 0 to 1Wow, read that over once or twice ;) The parameter t specifies the position of the value you want to get between Start_Value and End_Value as a fraction. For example, consider the linear run of numbers:
0,5,10,15,20,25, ...., 100It is said to be linear because the numbers progress by addition (+5 each time). Now, what is the number right in the middle of the sequence ? Easy, with our formula we just write:
Number_in_the_middle = 0 + 0.5 * (100 - 0)
= 50And that's the correct answer of course! (write the whole thing out if you're not sure ;))
Back to palettes and smooth color runs. We know that between color index 0 and 10 for example we want to have a smooth run of colors that goes from black to blue. All we have to do to get those colors in between is:
Color = Black + t * (Blue - Black)and since we want to do this from color index 0 to 10: t=i/10 where i is the index of the color to generate. Colors of course have red, green and blue components so the real calculation is:
t = i / 10
Color.Red = Black.Red + t * (Blue.Red - Black.Red)
Color.Green = Black.Green + t * (Blue.Green - Black.Green)
Color.Blue = Black.Blue + t * (Blue.Blue - Black.Blue)The following C code will do the job for you:
void make_gradient (byte start_index, byte red_s, byte green_s,
byte blue_s, byte end_index, byte red_e,
byte green_e, byte blue_e)
{
//Produces smooth gradients from RGB_start to RGB_end
//(on the variable's names s = start and e = end
unsigned char index;
unsigned char max = (end_index - start_index);
float red_inc, green_inc, blue_inc;
//Set the two starting values
set_color(start_index, red_s, green_s, blue_s);
set_color(end_index, red_e, green_e, blue_e);
//Compute the RGB increments
red_inc = (red_e - red_s) / ((float) (max));
green_inc = (green_e - green_s) / ((float) (max));
blue_inc = (blue_e - blue_s) / ((float) (max));
//Set middle colors
for (index = 1; index < max; index++)
set_color((start_index + index), (red_s + red_inc * index),
(green_s + green_inc * index),
(blue_s + blue_inc * index));
}I assume that you can write the set_color function on your own. Making a good palette will take a little tweaking, but this function will make things easier.
Part II: I want to see some flames!
Ok, ok, here it comes ... Lets see how this cool effects is done:
There are several steps to the algorithm:
- a) Generate the bottom of the fire (to keep it going)
- b) Scroll the fire up
- c) Smooth the colors as they move up
- d) Display to the screen
We will need at least two arrays the same size of the screen (320x200).
a) The bottom line is filled randomly at various places with white (color 255). Now you will need a random number generator to do this.
At the time I wrote the program, I had no clue as to how to do that, and I figured it required very complex mathematics. It turns out that it doesn't. However I didn't know that at the time and I found an alternate solution. I pregenerated a few random 'bottom line' for the fire and simply copied them to the bottom line of the fire buffer at run time. That's not the best way though. Here is a small bit of inline assembly that will generate a pseudo-random number between 0 and n - 1:
(n should be smaller that 255 even though the parameter is an int)
int seed;
int fast_rand(int n)
{
asm mov ax, seed
asm add ax, 1234
asm xor al, ah
asm rol ah, l
asm add ax, 4321
asm ror al, 1
asm xor ah, al
asm mov seed, ax
asm xor dx, dx
asm mov cx, n
asm div cx ;Divide by n
asm mov al, ah ;Save remainder (which ranges from 0 - (n-1))
asm xor ah, ah
;Return value is in _AX
}There is no real logic behind this, the idea is just to mess with the value in the seed variable enough so that it look random. You might want to fool with that function yourself to make it smaller or whatever. I think you get the idea.
b/c)This part of the algorithm is what makes the fire realy go. Lets call our first offscreen buffer, page1 and the other page2. The trick to scroll upwards is to read pixel (x, y) from page1 and to display it at (x, y-1) on page2. (Note that special care must be taken not to go beyond the memory limit of the buffer).
But simple upward scrolling is not what we need. We need to decrease the pixel color as well. And to do this correctly we must smooth the value that is being scrolled up. Instead of reading the pixel (x,y), we read the pixels AROUND (x,y) and put an AVERAGE of those into (x,y-1) on page2. Having a palette organized linearly helps with this since we don't have to worry about the rbg values of the colors, we can just average their indexes and it will look good :)
In order to make the averaging process simpler, we take the 4 or 8 surrounding pixels and use a shift to divide the result.
Thus:
page2(x,y-1)=(page1(x-1,y-1) + page1(x,y-1) + page1(x+1,y-1)
page1(x-1,y ) + 0 + page1(x+1,y )
page1(x-1,y+1) + page1(x,y+1) + page1(x+1,y+1)) >> 3;d)Now that page2 contains a smoothed and moved up page1, we can just copy it to the screen with our favorite 'rep movsd' instruction and swap around page1 and page2 so we can repeat the process again. And that's it! You should have a burning fire on your screen!
Part III: Higher Grounds
- Ok, I got all that, but how can I make this even better ?
There are several variations on this theme. Lets see briefly in theory what they are.
The first possibility, which I have implemented, is based on a program by Frank Paxti that I found a while ago on Hornet.org (which is closed now unfortunately :_( ). The idea is to work on a per-pixel basis. When you move a pixel up, you randomly displace its x coordinate by -1, 0, or 1. You also decrease its color randomly based on a decay value. The fire is kept running by copying to the bottom line a few random colored pixels which are smoothed (only the bottom line that is) so that the fire will spread left and right. This really looks real good. I'm not posting the source I've written to my homepage because its basically a C translation of what that other guy had done in pascal/asm, mail me (darki@multimania.com) if you desperately want to have a look at it or browse the ruins of Hornet.org and see if you can find the original still there...
Other ideas for a better fire effect would be to distort the bitmap with an image warping algorithm on top of the rest, I don't know if this would really look good and I haven't tried to implement it. Its up to you to see ... You might also try to code this effect with high/true color video modes (15,16,24 and 32bit). It would probably require a color table to emulate the palette hardware ...
Conclusion/Final word
That's all folks! If you have any comments, question or suggestions, this is your chance: e-mail me at: darki@multimania.com I will try to reply to all mail personally or make global updates to this text file if many people have the same problem. Feel free to submit ideas or topics you would like to read a tutorials about ;)
Visit my homepage: http://www.multimania.com/darki/
