Info File

Author:   George Ziniewicz
Email:    zin1@home.com    zin@zintel.com
Homepage: http://www.zintel.com

---

Flipcode Coding Contest: Precipitation

Name: RainZ

   A simulation of one of my favorite visuals: driving along wet city streets at night.
   If you listen carefully, you can hear the windshield wipers.

   Includes:
      Adjustable speed vertex-lit roadway, with abstracted buildings, bridges, signs and cars
      Adjustable Wet-street reflection pattern via an updating procedural texture
      Lights rendered w/ updating procedural lens flare texture w/ halo and rotating features
      Scrolling cloud layers w/ varying intensity splashing falling rain
      Particle fog via procedural smoke texture
      Lightning with:
         procedural spark texture
         adjustable arc width and flash interval
         ground particle sparks
         ball-lightning/glow effect
         ambient-highlighting effect
      Adjustable-width Rear-View Mirror
      Infinite starfield (if you drive around in Viewcam Manual Mode)
      Ambient rain sound, rain-intensity-cued w/ adjustable volume and frequency
      Thunder in 3D w/ frequency inversely-proportional to distance
      Monitor Test Pattern for adjusting brightness and geometry
      ViewCam control for automatic fly-overs, or manual control:
         Mouse X:   Look Orientation around Y
         LeftClick: Move Forward
         ArrowKeys: Move and sidestep in x&z
         Delete/CenterClick: Jump
         Hint: slow down road speed to 0 (PageDown) for a fixed world
 
   Press ? for a help screen of key controls, or right-click for extensive popup menus (50+ controls).

   Note the menus can also be navigated solely by keys:
     ` (unshifted ~ tilde) - toggle current popup menu
             Up/Down Arrow - scroll vertically through controls
          Left/Right Arrow - adjust slider 1%, or toggle switch, or activate button

   It runs about 50-120 fps on my hp 1 gig athlon w/ GeForce2 Ultra, running Win98.
      (to compare: press keys "r" then "c"  for Reset + ClockToggle)

   Credits:
      3D Sound System by FMOD
      The Doors, for a short downsampled intro from "Riders On the Storm"
      THX-Dolby for a downsampled intro sound
      Thunder and Rain "SFX by littlemusicclub.com"


   Changes:
      Added Building % slider
      Changed default blend functions from (1,1) to (1,1-srcColor), better for "Trails"
      Fixed a bug that caused road textures to overlap
      Increased wav file quality rate (higher-sampling & bigger files: 1 meg zip)


   Modified: 3-13-02: set default sound to 1st device

zin
