Plumbing Water Ideas needed!?

Hi there..

I´m working on a 3D Plumbing Minigame..
Perhaps you know such a thing from Bioshock (hacking):

My onw uses 3D models as Pipes...

I´ve the Pipeline System.. the times.. everything is great..
BUT...

I´ve no clue how to create the water (or what else) floating through my 3D Pipes...


I thought of many Sprite-Entities wich are bouncing in the pipes...
Or a great number of particles with collision...

But.. that are all performance killers...

So.. do you have any good idea??

i would use blender to scale a cylindrical water model through the pipe along a curve and then export it as vertex animation.

How about animated textures.

Each pipe 'piece' has its own animation,
based on its orientation, and water direction.


Or do like ventilator sae, but make the water-models semi-transparent,
and have sprite orparticle "bubble"s flowing with it...

or a scrolling texture (entity.u/v) with the right alpha channel could work too.

it is not a good solution but you can also change the skin
or make an invisible object visible
I would use an object with waterskin for the cylinders which is increasing and for the curves change the skin so it looks a little bit fluently

I would say just have the water animated in the models. Like have the pipe at empty be frame 1 or something , then on have a filling with water animation , and a full animation, then when you rotate the pipe or something and it gets the right position , have the filling animation start , then when it's done have it switch to the full animation. To animate the water you can just have the water cylinder inside the tube pipe, just position it where the pipes connect so you don't see it , and scale it's length to something like 1, then hit the button to animate and move to frame 10 or something and scale it so it fills the whole tube(animation process depends on program your using for the models, but it should be similar). Hope it helps.

This is my first idea, and after reading the rest, by far the best solution (when UV'd properly, and with a nice skin).
Ofcourse this can be enhandced by a little amount of particles or some other love... But it will not kill the framerate at all

regards,

Unfortunately, this wont be that easy.
The water can flow with 2 direction. Not to mention the cross pipes that has 2 pipes and water can come from... uh... let's says every direction to every direction(I hope you can figure what I mean, since I dont ). The best way will be what_do_I_die suggestion by having some preanimated flows.

Use Lightbeams. You don't need to animate them, as they are much too fast. Just two states per model: On and off.

i use electricity.. that looks cool and is easy to use ^^

thx anyways..good ideas ^^

I wonder how bad you must program, to make such a type of game
have any impact on the framerate

the framerate is (with alle blocks filled with electricity) still more than 300
I think that´s ok ^^