Campfire

This is just me trying to simulate fire in Pico8 without shaders or fancy particle systems.

My approach is :

At load time :
- Generate bursts of animated particles
- Each particle increments the brightness value for the pixels it sits on
- The burst animations are baked into the spritesheet
At run time :
- Animate the baked sprites (moving them up)
- Again, add the brightness values together

The brightness value (which is just a color from 0 to 7) is mapped to a fire shade with pal().

There are other particle systems for bursts of sparkles and fireflies.

Any thought? What would be your approach?

v2 update

use colors 0 to 7 for fire shades : no table needed to store brightness values
bake animations into spritesheet for performance
got rid of smoke
add flickering
nicer fireflies and flying ember
add clouds

v3 update

press a button to toggle scene on/off (monitor CPU usage of fire only)

P#118338 2022-10-01 23:56 ( Edited 2022-10-02 22:14)

Ummmm_ok

very cool. what if the objects around the fire flickered? or the smoke was lit up by the fire. i can't wait to see more of this.

P#118339 2022-10-02 00:25

pck404

Thanks !
Yes I tried the flickering on the rocks edges but I couldn't get it right. I was picking a random shade (lit or unlit) each frame and that looked nasty !
The lit smoke is a cool idea, I'll try that!

P#118342 2022-10-02 00:37

Ummmm_ok

@pck404 you're welcome :). As for the flickering on the rocks, it should base on proximity to the nearest particle, or if that's not happening quite yet, it should be periodically as opposed to randomly.

P#118343 2022-10-02 01:18