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Submitted by , posted on 15 March 2002
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Image Description, by
As you can see from the image, this IOTD has to do
with particle effects. One big problem with images of
particle effects is that particle effects generally
only look good when they're moving. But seeing as the
main reason for this post is not to show off the
particle effects themselves, but to present a means of
creating them, it's perhaps not such a problem.
The tool has been designed to allow the user to create
particle effects which can be exported from the app
straight into the game engine. A particle effect is
composed of a number of particle systems, and each
system may be influenced by any number of so-called
affectors (gravity, faders...). This structure is
represented in a tree view which you can make out on
the right hand side of the images. The particle effect
runs the whole time in the display window, with any
changes and additions to the effect taking place on
the fly.
The thing that makes the tool interesting is that the
affectors have a generic interface to both the tool
and the game engine, which allows the particle engine
to be extended by new affectors without having to make
any changes to either the engine or the particle tool
(at the moment it's all statically linked, so I do
have to recompile).
A small demo is available at
http://nwaldren.bei.t-online.de/other_stuff.htm. It
includes a few affectors, a couple of (meaningless)
samples and supports saving and loading in an ascii
text format.
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