Particles Systems: First Iteration
After one month of hard work on particles systems, we finally got the first iteration of the engine and the user interface.
The engine is based on the SPARK Engine, altered to work perfectly with the existing rendering pipeline of CP3D. It successfully works with shadows, I mean particles systems can cast and receive shadows for more realism!
Before creating the article, I wanted this first iteration to be “fully” completed. So, today you’re able to export/import particles systems, edit them (I mean add/remove/edit every kind of object of a system) and create easily new instances of the systems using the CP3D API (ex. with multiple explosions).
The following video is demonstrating the particles systems engine in act (fire + smoke, galaxy). Both examples need zero line of code but only parameter settings using a more advanced tree view.
Today, the nodes of the tree view can receive only one connection, where in the next iteration, you’ll be able to connect multiple settings to nodes. This can be very useful when you want to manage gameplay events.
My goal for the next iteration: Use scripts for custom behaviors, custom updates, etc. Example: Imagine that you create a rain particle system and you want to kill a rain particle when it collides with an object and then create the associated splash on the object. You can also script it to tell the system to be in the same XZ coordinates because it is not useful to apply rain on the entire map!
Now, let the video play! (Link on Youtube)
