Die-on-Collide for Particles

Particle rain is a nice thing, HOWEVER it does have a certain problem of going through everything, so that it appears to be raining indoors. Same thing with snow, any other effect that's done with textured particle scripting. It would be really nice if there was a property so that once a particle collided with a solid object it went away. That way things like roofs and walls and canopies and things can really stop the rain, and it will fall all about properly.

Particles don't have any kind of physical interaction with the world, because they only exist in the client. Even "bouncing on the ground" is fake.

It would be nice if you could specify a bounding box for the particles, so they would die once they passed out of that box. You can limit them to some extent by carefully specifying their speed, acceleration, and lifetime, but there's a very limited set of circumstances where this can be used to realistically simulate rain landing on a surface. I used a set of maybe 30 or so particle generators to make rain outside my house that only landed in the areas where you'd expect rain to fall, on the pond outside, on the balconies, but not inside or UNDER the shelter of a balcony... and even that wasn't perfect. It's good enough nobody's commented on it raining inside, at least.

I don't know how much support OpenGL has for handling intercept calculations automatically. OpenGL does have a good map of teh actual surfaces, so if it can detect collisions it could be made to do the job. But I think it would be asking a bit much of the client to manage it.

But expending the "z axis bounce" trick to let you specify the maximum distance for particles from the generator... that would probably be workable.

Maaaaybe. But the fact is that if they could be made to die on intersect, even just clientside you could do things like toss out rain particles, and things like awnings and umbrellas, and where they met the particles would stop. I for one think it would be cool to sit under an awning and watch it rain just beyond the edge. Another maybe would be integrating weather into land controls. Make it sunny, rainy, snowy, windy on your property... Tornado, anyone?

That would be nice. The thing is, though, is that POSSIBLE? (Strife?)