I think it would be cool if you had a crash then smoke came pouring out of the engine, and maybe some smoke coming out of the exhaust when starting the car up.
It would be but it would be hard on the computer. Ive noticed that any game with smoke tends to lag as more smoke appears. Something to do with the way its shaded or something I guess. If it is put into the game, I would like to see it come out of open spots/seals on the hood and not just go through the hood like in GTA.
i have noticed that with some games the smoke makes it lag but not usually, and i hate it when the smoke goes through the hood but i guess if it is like mafia 2 with the physX, it never goes through walls or anything.
If you want fluid simulated smoke so it doesn't pass through objects, you're gonna have really bad performance. You'd need a really high grid resolution to simulate smoke coming through gaps in the car and front grill. You wouldn't even get near 1fps with a high resolution fluid simulation in game. PCs are about a decade off being able to do that stuff properly. PhysX smoke is very very low resolution. it's only a couple particles per square meter, which is why it runs okay, but also why the smoke behaves oddly.
Erm.. You don't need to simulate smoke like that just to make it come through gaps in the grille... They could just fake it like they do in GTA IV, works fine there and doesn't hurt the framerate at all, and it looks very decent(imho at least, the smoke/explosion effects in that game are pretty well done). I'd imagine maybe with lua scripting thing(if the devs won't implement this themselves) you could just have one node that's set as the grille and one for the radiator, so when it's broken with the hood on, the smoke comes forward then up from the grille node, and if the hood is off it goes from the radiator node straight up. Yeah it'll clip through the little slot-deviders in the grille but really, I doubt it would be noticable. So no, you don't need all that super realistic simulation stuff just for the sake of having visible smoke...
Well of course, but it still doesn't look very good. Not many games have good smoke effects, I can only name a couple such as the new Arma3 for example. At the end of the day, even the best smoke effects are pretty poor where you compare it to a simulated and rendered output.
if the smoke was like Gta 4, to me it would seem fine and maybe the smoke doesn't look great but i have never seen any really good smoke effects in any game, though i think GRID had cool tire smoke.
I think we should at least have steam. (Say you smash into something hard enough to bust up the radiator but not the engine itself)
+1 to this, because the majority of the time in car accidents it's mostly steam pouring out the front from a bust radiator, actually Gabe said that when mechanical damage is implemented the radiator will be able to break, so a steam effect seems very likely (hopefully my speculation is correct ).
