Particles (Page 1 of 2)

Great work Nistur, on getting the partical system working. If you need any art assets "partical textures or models" to
test with let me know. Once again congratulations

Lol I didnt mean 3D models as sprites, what I meant was... Example I have a wooden staff model with an emerald that should have a partical effect. If you need models to test partical effects on

How do you want the partical textures (colored or transparent background), also should the textures be colored example: should a flame partical be colored like a flame or just white.

Awesome, especially video 2
Can't wait to see more!

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.

I have to say that, when I saw the art, the first thing I thought was Brian Jacques. I have to admit to not having read much though...

I will try and get some example videos of real world/professional particle systems (ie. movies) to try and simulate, for reference material. For now, I'm trying to add physics to my smoke, so I can make it swirl slow work though

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.

From what I gather from the nvidia video, is all real time and could potentially be in a game, is probably far too heavy duty for any game now, CPU/GPU cycles are better spent elsewhere, but the principle is there.

For my game, atmosphere is probably the most important bit for me to work on, and having the player be able to swirl the smoke is something I will be asking towards.

With regards to the scene(s), I was thinking that the separate scenes may be best to showcase the more advanced features and then having one scene with "standard" particle emitters... But I honestly have no idea, I'm no designer and I only really want, here, what is easiest for other people to play around with.

I have absolutely nothing against any license used on assets, as long as it allows me to distribute it freely along with the library

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...

Can we create groups of the single point emitters?

Wow, thanks for the quick replies.

Arclord: Thanks. I've not seen that one before. Being 2D some things, of course, can't carry across, but I was also having a look at HGE as it has a nice particle editor. I'll get Enthanon and take a look at that one too.

Zester: We can, but for one thing, if we keep the number of emitters low, it's easier to maintain them. Creating a box emitter is simple anyway though, when you emit a particle, you just get a random position within a specified region, rather than just use the emtity position itself. I could really do with having an "editor draw" function in the behaviours, so that I can represent them in the editor easily. I might actually see if I can add this to Maratis.

Vegas: Wow. Thanks. I'll take a look at them. I definitely like the OpenGL Physics video. I'll take a look at all of them. Seeing some of that stuff though, makes me think that maybe non-axis aligned bounding boxes might be worthwhile...

So much stuff to look at and so little time. Woe is me Also looking again into fluid dynamics... I seem to like things which will most likely destroy me...

Again, thanks for the suggestions and links. Time to do a bit more research!

Hi,
I found a connexion, not online for a long time, just to say it's looking nice,
and if you want to draw something only visible in editor, you can do it in the behavior draw function
and to know if you are in editor, check if the game is running :

draw particles etc

if(! game->isRunning())
{
    draw wire emitters, additional stuff
}