Improved Light Effects

As if all the new renderer goodness I had reported about in my last worklog entry wasn't enough, many light effects have received quite a boost recently, thanks to the help of D2X-XL forum user Jaz who has pointed me in a few directions I hadn't known of before. Besides providing some really nice new code for light coronas which look much better now than they did before, he explained to me that transparent light emitting effects (e.g. explosions or light trails) had to be rendered by adding their color to their background instead of simply overlaying it. Changing that was a small step in D2X-XL coding, but a big step for the visuals it offers to its users.

Hand in hand with these changes came a lot of small and bigger tweaks, e.g. improving shrapnel rendering speed and smoke appearance (once again, this story never seems to end ): Smoke particles now can rotate, making smoke look billowing more naturally than before.

I have to say that I am pretty satisfied with what has been achieved here.