Downloading it now … c’mon c’mon … hurry up!

Great stuff! One question though: why did you turn off fixed time step and syncing with vertical retrace? That caused some awful tearing on my machine. I re-enabled both and it still ran great. Any particular reason?

I uploaded the modified version. Thanks, Nick for pointing it out.

“This effect is so going into my code.”

Ditto.

Oh my god, i have nearly cum in my pants playing with this!!! It’s amazing!

The actual lightning branches are all 3D vertices.
To put them in a 3D scene, you would have to modify some code, and instead of rendering the lightning on a transparent render taget (liek I do), render it directly into your scene.

Hi again,

If I want to render the lightning effect in a 3d world, should I change texture coordinates in the lightning vertex class to a vector3, and then change the lightningpoint.texturecoordinate in the lightning bolt class to the point in 3d space?

I would make the modifications for 3D, but I don’t really have much free time for this.

No, that code is fine as it is.

I mean when you set the StartPoint and EndPoint.
In truth, most code already works with Vector3 wherever possible. So as I said above, I believe chaging the GetJitter function to add a random Vector3 should do the trick.

That’s probably related to the depth buffer.

Thanks alot.

I will try to integrate this stuff into my deferred shading, it probably works well in alpha drawing.

I am attempting to use your effect in 3D. All I had to do was comment out the render target code and it works perfectly fine on PC. However, when I run it on the 360 it looks horrible, the lighting bolts have black squares and black sections. Here are the changes I made to the code:

public void GenerateTexture(GameTime gameTime, Matrix world, Matrix view, Matrix projection)
{
GraphicsDevice device = game.GraphicsDevice;

//device.SetRenderTarget(0, lightningRT);
//device.Clear(ClearOptions.Target,Color.TransparentBlack,1.0f,0);

lightningDrawEffect.Parameters[“World”].SetValue(world);
lightningDrawEffect.Parameters[“View”].SetValue(view);
lightningDrawEffect.Parameters[“Projection”].SetValue(projection);
lightningDrawEffect.Parameters[“StartColor”].SetValue(properties.InteriorColor.ToVector3());
lightningDrawEffect.Parameters[“EndColor”].SetValue(properties.ExteriorColor.ToVector3());

device.RenderState.AlphaBlendEnable = true;
device.RenderState.BlendFunction = BlendFunction.Max;

using (VertexDeclaration vdecl = new VertexDeclaration(device, LightningVertex.VertexElements))
{
device.VertexDeclaration = vdecl;
device.RenderState.CullMode = CullMode.None;
lightningDrawEffect.Begin();
lightningDrawEffect.CurrentTechnique.Passes[0].Begin();
device.DrawUserIndexedPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleList, lightningPoints, 0, lightningPoints.Length, indices, 0, indices.Length / 3);
lightningDrawEffect.CurrentTechnique.Passes[0].End();
lightningDrawEffect.End();
}

//device.SetRenderTarget(0, null);
//if(properties.IsGlowEnabled)
// postProcessGlow.ApplyEffect(lightningRT, lightningRT, properties.GlowIntensity);
}

protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime)
{
GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.Black);

//draw it in 2D
Matrix viewMatrix = Matrix.CreateLookAt(new Vector3(0, 0, 10), new Vector3(0, 0, 0), new Vector3(0, 1, 0));
Matrix projectionMatrix = Matrix.CreateOrthographic(GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width / 20, GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height / 20, 0.01f, 50);
Matrix worldMatrix = Matrix.Identity;

//generate the lightning rendering
lightnings[currentItem].GenerateTexture(gameTime, worldMatrix, viewMatrix, projectionMatrix);

Rectangle rect = new Rectangle(0, 0, GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width, GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height);

//GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.Black);
//spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteBlendMode.Additive);
//if (showBackground)
// spriteBatch.Draw(background,rect,Color.White);
////draw lightning texture over the scene
//spriteBatch.Draw(lightnings[currentItem].LightningTexture, rect, Color.White);
//spriteBatch.End();

base.Draw(gameTime);
}

Hiya, Ive implemented a 3d version of this. It still renders along a 2d plane but is rendered in 3d. I also created a 3d jitter function but that didn’t seem to change anything.

The only problem Im finding now, is that I cannot for the life of me, get the X/Y/Z coords to face the camera correctly.

So, from some angles, it looks fine, and from others – really really bad.

Is there something Im missing?
Please Help.

This looks fantastic, and very true to the original sample. My use would be 2D, to pre-render sprites of (glowy/neon) laserbeams. I’d absolutely love for a version of this to be updated and run-able in the new 4.0 version of the XNA Game Studio framework.

I’m trying out a re-instrumentation of the code, but may not be successful. If anyone already wanted to do this, then I’d love to hear about it.

Any 4.0 version of this?

Converting it has so far failed for me…
So many things changed…

Cool effects. One question… can we use these classes in our commercial projects?

What are the license terms?

(I will put your names in the credits, of course).

Thank you.