Virtual Fire
This article is reprinted from my Virtual Nature blog on September 20, 2006. Added text is italicized.
The Inn at Tol Erassea
Fire is a necessary element to our real lives and utterly destructive when uncontrolled. We represent flame in virtual worlds for the sole purpose of seeing it as we cannot feel or use its heat. This elemental tie is either somehow beneficial to us or simply displays our lack of imagination. I suspect the former based on the fact that the representations generally seem to be used to create a mood. We build the fundamental appearance of something vital to our first lives and throw it into a corner as window dressing for our virtual lives. Is this what people mean when they say that Second Life is a “better world?”
An Old Castle (no longer standing)
Practically, builders do usually strive to enhance the appearance of a blaze by integrating static prims or adding surreal, colourful effects. The two methods of presentation are animated textures on prim faces and particle productions. The pictures above and to the left below demonstrate animated flame textures on prims and the use of solids to enhance the appearance of roaring, eternal fires. The pictures below displays the use of particles to simulate a burning effect. Note that the particles don’t lend a realistic appearance of flames. Particles can, however, be produced in randomly changing numbers, react to the wind vector, and shift their colouring to the extent of producing a smoke-like effect before dissipating with much less scripting and lag causing demands than their animated counterparts. Particles can now be rendered 8192 at a time, twice the older limit of 4096. Many people choose to set their viewable particle count to a lower value, or off altogether, to avoid client side lag.
Fate Gardens' Torch Tree
Magma & Smoke in the Pomponio Crater
Jopsy's Geysers in Teal
This comment was originally posted by Prokofy Neva:
I’ve come to hate fire prims, the prims with fire pictures taken from RL pasted on them, to simulate flames. There are griefers that massivey shoot them out of guns all over sims, where they hang for weeks on the parcels of no-shows.
I’m leaning more toward liking particle fires more these days. To me, particles, by their nature, are of the world, are of the simulated synthetic world and therefore “feel natural” and “are in harmony” with this synthetic nature, odd as that may sound. Pictures carted from RL, with its different physics and values, and pasted into SL, always feel fake to me.
This comment was originally posted by Khamon Fate:
I’m inclined to agree. It follows the same logic as designing architecture to serve the needs of avatars rather than realistic humans.
It is the case, however, that textures already being used in a build can often by stretched and colours to simulate things such as bark, flowing water, lava, melting wax et cetera. Designers too often fail to experiment with texture reuse and instead just slap another large download on us.
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