Particle Designer

Hi everyone

I just wanted to post a little teaser about a desktop app Tom Bradley and I are working on. When creating SLQ it was really good fun playing with the particle emitter but it was very much trial and error. Now the book is in edit I decided to create a desktop app that would allow you to visually design your particle emitter.

In SLQ the particle emitter is configured using an XML file. The Particle Designer I’m creating allows you to play with all the different settings supported by the ParticleEmitter class and then creates the XML config file. This file can then be used inside your iPhone projects that use the ParticleEmitter class.

This has taken playing with particles to an all new level and I’ve spent WAY too long just playing. I’ll be posting a demo video shortly but wanted to give you a quick screen shot as the app has really moved on this weekend.

Particle Designer


I think this is going to make designing emitters much more fun and is just one of a number of different tools I want to create natively for the Mac to help with game development.

I actually ported the game engine from SLQ to the desktop and apart from a few minor changes its working really well :o)

As I said, I’ll get a video demo of this up shortly. This app is going to be freely available once it’s finished and will work natively with the code from the book.

Mike

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5 Comments

Tony  on March 14th, 2010

Awesome!

Nice surprise that the game engine can be ported to the desktop with only minor changes.

Cheers

mike  on March 14th, 2010

Yeah, I was pleased about it. It took me about an hour to get the Image, Texture2D, Image Render Manager and Texture Manager classes along with the game loop over to a Cocoa OpenGL app.

The main change was to switch from UIImage to NSImage which ended up being pretty simple. The other change was that for some reason I’ve not been able to get glDrawElements to actually render anything to the screen :o( so for the moment the Image Render Manager is rendering individual quads. On a desktop and with only particles being used this is not a problem and performance is fine, but I will work out the problem and get it using glDrawElements :o)

Glad you like it. The video should be up soon.

Mike

Mr Speaker  on March 14th, 2010

A while ago I followed your original Particle Emitter article and made a version that ran using HTML5 Canvas in JavaScript.

I found the same thing you did: updating the parameters by hand is a pain! So I made an editor too: http://mrspeaker.net/dev/parcycle/

(It actually runs on the iphone as well… albiet at about 2 frames a second!)

Peter  on March 15th, 2010

This looks super awesome. I REALLY can’t wait to download and use this!

Thanks Mike

nexus6  on March 30th, 2010

@Mike,
I know you are very busy, any idea when the particle designer will be available. I switched everything over to the new code from the book, but now my particle stuff looks totally different. The designer would make it a lot easier to redesign things to the new stuff. What I did was create the correct XML files using the settings from my old code but it comes out totally different with the new particle class.

Thanks…

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