My old particle system is not currently available.
My new particle system is on hold until Mark implements zbuffering for surfaces which use vertex alpha. Without that you are either limited to multiply/add blend, or you have to use animated textures with animated alpha in order to make the particles fade in/out.
Single surface particle systems are only about 2x as fast as systems that use multiple entities, at least on mid-range 3d cards. And they limit the effects you can create a lot. For example, a lot of the particle effects you see in movies use solid objects rather than little flat 2D shapes. Like the dragon fire in Shrek was made with brightly colored spheres with a 2d glow superimposed over them. Doing the same kind of thing with single surface particles would require a TON of particles, whereas in shrek a long burst of dragon flame only used maybe 100 spheres max and it looked a ton better.
I think maybe I will experiment in my tank game with rendering smoke as a set of 3d spheres instead of the current 2D shapes I have right now which don't look that cartoony.
The nice thing about a multiple-entity particle system is that each particle can have lots of polygons and thus do a lot more. Like you can make a particle a sphere, or a torus, or a cylynder or cone. And that can save you tons of particles.
My new particle system is on hold until Mark implements zbuffering for surfaces which use vertex alpha. Without that you are either limited to multiply/add blend, or you have to use animated textures with animated alpha in order to make the particles fade in/out.
Single surface particle systems are only about 2x as fast as systems that use multiple entities, at least on mid-range 3d cards. And they limit the effects you can create a lot. For example, a lot of the particle effects you see in movies use solid objects rather than little flat 2D shapes. Like the dragon fire in Shrek was made with brightly colored spheres with a 2d glow superimposed over them. Doing the same kind of thing with single surface particles would require a TON of particles, whereas in shrek a long burst of dragon flame only used maybe 100 spheres max and it looked a ton better.
I think maybe I will experiment in my tank game with rendering smoke as a set of 3d spheres instead of the current 2D shapes I have right now which don't look that cartoony.
The nice thing about a multiple-entity particle system is that each particle can have lots of polygons and thus do a lot more. Like you can make a particle a sphere, or a torus, or a cylynder or cone. And that can save you tons of particles.