heatcloud - beyond-all-reason/springrts_engine_wiki_mirror GitHub Wiki
heatcloud is one of the simplest and most common explosion types. Ironically, it is also one of the least intuitive. First of all, ignore the name--it basically makes an expanding image at the point at which it is spawned.
heatcloud makes a good main piece of an explosion. Think of it as a background for the other components of your explosion generator.
Most explosions have alpha and ttl. I don't know why heatcloud uses these instead. Basically:
Starting alpha = heat / maxheat
ttl = heat / heatFalloff
The alpha decreases linearly across the heatcloud's lifetime.
The heatcloud starts at size size and grows sizeGrowth each frame.
It seems that the heatcloud expands by a factor of (1 - sizemod) each frame. The sizemod itself is multiplied by sizemodmod every frame. Most of the time it's probably best just not to contemplate these.
The texture of the heatcloud.