We stayed with the 6.22 engine for this release. I own Pro, but the only feature I really use from it is the "Resource" function so that all my code and assets aren't just hanging out.
Man, thanks for the lava compliments--I guess I've been staring at it for too long
. As for the lava, here's my Lava spiel: (although I have to admit that the little fire spurts are my very favorite
--particles are much easier, better-looking, and less taxing on the engine than I ever imagined.)
Basically, the lava flow was just shifting texture along its mapping coordinates, "my.u+=2*time;", or something like that. To get it looking good, we'd create custom glow polygons around the border of the flow, but that was a huge pain, and we only did it in one or two spots. Lighting--dim, red lights amid lots of darkness. Steam--pretty simple particle effect. The sound FX help too--basically just some thick water stuff.
The only kinda tricky thing we did was make some morphing lava flows in a couple spots, where the actual geometry of the flow changes in addition to just the mapping coordinates. But that was kinda tricky too, and we only did it here and there.
Modeling the waterfalls turned out easier than we thought--would have done more if I'd known. We could quite easily export all the WED blocks into MED, then into .3ds, then into Maya. With that, we could easily model in a perfectly fitting waterfall. You had to be a little tricky with how you mapped it to get the sense of acceleration in the waterfall--and we probably should have spent longer on it, but our deadline was upon us.
My only real bottle-neck was that if I tried to morph the vertices too much, the edges would start popping and mess up the animation along the UVs--so I couldn't do any morphs that were very substantial.
.
