Orb now has an XML engine under the hood. So what? Well, I’ll tell ya what!

XPATH.

What the heck is XPATH?
XPATH is a nice way that somebody came up with to denote a specific element (or set of elements) in an XML document.

They work a lot like filesystem paths; if you consider each file on your hard drive to be an element in a hierarchy (which it is) then the path to that file (e.g. C:\Program Files\Orb\OrbEdit.exe) is simply a condensed description of where that file is in the hierarchy. XPATH works the same way.

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Way back at the dawn of Orb I decided that I wanted all my data to be stored in XML. Every object in Orb should be easily written to XML and then later, easily recreated from that same XML. The promise of XML was too seductive to ignore; fantastically flexible, perfectly portable, and only 80 calories per serving! Sure, my files would probably be a little large and slower to read, but who cares? Modern hardware is the panacea to all inefficiency!

Would XML prove to be the best decision of my life or one that I would spend the rest of my days crying into my beer about? Read on to find out!

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We have arrived at my favorite part of this tutorial, Part 3! In this part, we’re going to take our already-cool lightburst effect and make it even cooler, with a few simple tricks.

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Welcome to Part 2 of the lightburst tutorial.

Yesterday in Part 1, I laid out some simple steps in Photoshop to create a nice texture for our lightburst. Today, I’m going to load that texture in the 4GE game engine and apply some different blending modes to get glowing results. Tomorrow in Part 3, I will use some nice shader and scripting techniques to really make this tutorial shine.

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Here’s a topic I’ve been meaning to put together a tutorial on for quite a while, and that is how to make a good-looking lightburst effect. For years I’ve been seeing effects like this in games, from full-on light explosions, to glowing balls of energy, to tiny sparkles used as particle effects. It seemed a very useful thing to be able to create this “glow” effect but I had never been able to find any good information on how to do it. So one afternoon I decided to sit down and figure it out for myself. Except it took me a week. And ths is what I came up with!

To get us started, here is an image of the end result we’re after:

This screenshot was taken from within the 4GE engine, the driving force behind Thorodin. This effect uses a combination of 3 techniques which I aim to cover in this tutorial series.

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