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I just had a quick fiddle with the plugin stuff... mainly because I was fiddling with the pspsdk stuff. The easiest way to do this is static linking everything together.

Anyway, I had a fiddle with the plugin system a little. I think I've got it more or less working. I should put this up with the disclaimer that I haven't actually tested this at all. It compiles and I _believe_ it should more or less work...

There's one thing that would need to be changed, which I didn't have time to finish doing on the train, and that's that MPlugin::Load currently takes the filename. This doesn't make sense in a static link context. For the static libraries, I would expect it to be something like plugin->Load("AwesomePlugin"); What I guess dynamic libraries could do is take that name and search relevant directories for AwesomePlugin.{dll,so,dylib} it doesn't do this right now. Anyway, just chucking this diff up for people to take a look at.

http://pastebin.com/hkpTLVis

EDIT: It's just occured to me, with MPlugin being in Maratis/Common, you can't currently link against it using the MSDK setup. To get it to work, I guess it would have to be moved to MEngine?

Thank you for your advice. I will ask some of my friends. I know a couple who might be able to help with this. I don't know any students any more, so it might be difficult to get permission from a university. Who knows, I might get lucky anyway.

These look great!
Erm, the ones I'm most interested in are... 2, 3, 4, 6 and maybe 7, as they should allow a couple of particle systems in each which should get some very nice effects.

Hopefully things have calmed down enough for me now to start working on this properly again...

Thanks, I will look into adding something to render the behaviours in the editor. It shouldn't be an issue really.

I think you've explained the issue here. I'm making it all too complex. I have 16 variables right now and it's looking messy. I should really really be more simplistic, like having a preset system. That's sort of what I was hoping for with the particle spec stuff. I will see what I can do about reducing the complexity a bit.

Blend Swap would be a great idea. The issue is, of course, somehow, the models would have to be exported as Maratis meshes, and also normalised in size for easy use. As it's all CC, as long as you credit the original creators, it should be ok to just use without a formal agreement, but it might be best to discuss this anyway. I don't know.

Yes, this is part of the reason why I'm a bit stuck... because I feel that it's a difficult concept to explain easily. Basically, I have 3 potential solutions:
1. Keep it as it is, with the Particle Emitter owning all the data ever.
2. Separate the Particle data into a Particle Spec and have it in human writable plaintext files.
3. Separate the Particle data into a Particle Spec and create an editor environment for it.

There are pros and cons with all 3 solutions. Those being:
1. This makes the editor VERY busy with a lot of behaviour values which can, at best, distract. At work confuse. On the plus side, it's easiest to do.
2. This is an acceptable compromise, but particle editing is then less graphical which will make it less accessible.
3. This is my "ideal" solution. It defers complexity to places where most of the time you don't have to worry about it (you make a "flame" particle spec and then just apply it to any firey emitters, without caring about the values in it) but it's also the most work.

Now, regarding #3. I could make a standalone particle editor for this. I could even fork the Maratis Editor, as you said. I'm not overly keen about this. If I remake part of the Maratis environment, then why not just use the one that exists and if I don't use Maratis, it's quite likely I wouldn't get things looking exactly the same as when it comes to displaying them in Maratis.

I think I have a plan for this. I will have to think further on it though. This is by no means a finalised design. Just a concept. So if anyone feels particularly strongly about anything here, give a shout and we can discuss things. So I guess I'd best tell you the plan, right?
Well, to begin with, as I've said, my "ideal" solution is to have a separate particle editor. So, clearly I will be aiming towards that. However, the logical step would be to go through suggestion #2, but, if I know that I'm aiming for #3, it will probably change the design a bit. For one thing, having a system that can read and write the same data is important.

This also leads me onto a slightly tangential point. Much as I love the fact that Maratis has an editor, for enclosed interior scenes especially, it can be a little uncomfortable to position and edit. For this reason, something I would love to be able to do is create a plugin at a later date (potentially called MIngEd), when loaded in a project, adds a keybinding (F10 by personal preference, but that's entirely unrelated now) which will allow editing in game. Of course this will be a lot of work and a lot more design. But the point here is that I will hopefully be doing any particle editor work so that it's flexible enough to allow multiple editor interfaces fairly easily.

Anyway, that's a lot of work to do and definitely won't be done any time soon, but hopefully will explain a couple of my reasons for some of the decisions.

I have been looking through all the suggestions just now, trying to figure out what the best option is to tidy up the current interface and what's exposed to the editor. Refactoring and documenting are fairly easy work, so I think I should be able to manage that during my lunch breaks at work

Just wondering if anyone had any preference as to how I refactor. To begin with, the current Behaviour "ParticleEmitter" is just getting too busy. To be honest, quite a lot of is isn't even totally relevant to the emitter itself. It just sticks it straight into the particle and forgets about it. I think this stuff I'm going to pull out into a ParticleSpec. Now, the first thing, do I make the Spec a behaviour? For the strictest definition, it's not a behaviour at all. Just data. Of course, the simplest thing is to make another behaviour for the spec.

The better solution (in my opinion) is to have an entirely separate spec type which isn't a behaviour at all. Multiple behaviours can then reference the specs by name (dropdown menu would be ideal, but let's not get ahead of ourselves here). The issue with this solution is that we have no way to graphically edit the specs. I can easily make them as fairly human readable plaintext files, but that's not really what we want, is it?

For a graphical editing environment for particle specs, I would either have to commandeer some space from the Maratis Editor, which is in pretty short supply, or write my own editor. Neither are particularly fun sounding tasks. Fortunately I think there's a third option, a hybrid. If I can squeeze a button somewhere into Maratis, I should be able to get it to fire up another window. If this window is also running through Maratis, we can share data with the particle systems and modify them directly, if there's no way to do it like that, we have to reflect the information, or just make sure that Maratis keeps checking the spec files.

I have to apologise for this seemingly dull babble, as I've made clear, I'm not a designer, and I am definitely not a UI designer. Part of this post is me just working through the concepts, and part of it is hoping for someone to say "You should do it this way, fool".

Oh, and don't worry, I haven't forgotten the demo stuff at all. I'm not abandonning that. It shouldn't take too long to throw something together once it all comes together.

I was just searching for fluid dynamic particles... I came across a demo video from a paper on the subject from 2010, which seems to be the basis for the nvidia video I mentioned before.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&f … cC-_-aqx18

I was in awe.
Until I saw the framerates.
3.5fps is NOT cool.

Then again, if you look at the car section at the end, and consider the 250k particle setup, 18fps is playable... definitely not what you should aim for... but then again, I think for 90% of situations, 250k particles is still far too many. If you're doing something this insane, you'd probably scale it back considerably more than 250k. That was a looooooong trail on the car.

Hehe, that's no problem. I think we all know that.

I think I need to start coming up with some firm goals for the particle system, some features I still need to implement.

One thing I've noticed that I probably need is a box emitter, rather than just a single point emitter. I really should have a look how other particle systems are set up. The one I was planning on using initially was quite difficult to figure out.

I will probably install Unity and have a play with how they do particles. Any more particle editors that I can have a look at, do you think? I'm getting a little worried by all this flexibility will make the behaviour awkward to use. Ah well. We'll see. I want to try to make a separate editor plugin to take care of the "world", so maybe I can just have an "advanced" flag in that... I really don't know. Why am I not a designer? That would make this easier...

The reason I'm doing the particle system initially is because I want a smokey room. So yes. Both of those should definitely be possible.
Moreover, the things I'm working on right now are physics interactions between particles and, hopefully eventually other game objects, should make it even more immersive. I played with the idea of using Bullet for this, as a lot of it would already be set up, but I didn't like the idea of that amount of collision with potentially complex shapes, but I think that cuboids and spheres should be able to get most of what is needed.

I was trying to find a video of the kind of thing I meant, I think I remember seeing it in a tech demo for one of the bigger engines, but I can't remember which one. The video showed, from memory, a generic space-marine-esque character with some sort of particle trail running through a doorway which had a particle... forcefield type thing, him running through it made the particles of the field disperse a bit and mix with that of his train. Difficult to explain.

The kind of thing I'm hoping for is actually in this NVidia tech demo (look when the car goes through it's own "cloud")
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuZQpWo9Qhs
However, that's 0.5M particles... and probably several people working very hard on some perfected GPU code... so I don't hold up much hope for being able to match that degree of finesse.

I would love to see a plan for your scene. I would say that anything that people can "donate" to the particle system, in terms of art would be most appreciated and almost definitely used. Eventually, I would like to create an application with several levels to demo the particle system to it's full. If I ever get the degree of fluid dynamics I hope for, I probably would have to sacrifice a lot of other particle emitters, so I'd have to make several scenes anyway. Having said that, it would be good to have one scene (and for some reason every time I attempt to picture it, I come up with a Roman bath house) which can demo the... "stock behaviour" of the system, so the basic things we've already mentioned: fire, water, some sparkly stuff, maybe snow, maybe even slow, non-physics-y smoke coming off a hot bath.

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. I still have a lot to do, including my simplified physics. Unfortunately, over the next, say week and a half, I will be pretty busy (I begin moving flat on Wednesday) so there won't be an awful lot of work that I will be able to do on the particle system. I will try and find some time to keep making a little headway though.

Wow, that looks really cool. Coincidentally, the scene I'm working on for my game is a bar too Yours looks a little bigger than mine though.

What I could really probably do with a couple of use-cases for the particle system. What I think would be really cool is if we could have a nice looking, but small, level we can use to demo different particle systems at the same time. What I can think of, off the top of my head, is a fire, a fountain, smoke, and some sparkly magic object (like the staff). Of course there are many other things that it can be used for...

I spent last night fiddling with particle sizes, trying to get a rough idea of what I can currently do with the system. As I'm still only using point sprites, and I can't colour the sprites yet, it's quite limited, but I have got some nice looking fire. There will be videos and screenshots coming soon.