Yes, a crap load. Basically to justify the cost, think about how long it would take you to create the library and times that by your countries minimum wage.
For example, Sprite Candy, the sister package of particle candy, is over 12000 lines of code. It costs about £10, the minimum wage in the UK is £5.50
That means to justify the cost of not buying it, I would have to produce 12000 working lines of code, documentation and bug fixes in under 2 hours.......
If you want to program a particle system as a learning experiance, then by all means do so. If you want something that you can quickly get particles into your game, then always buy the lib.
Other than that, try a free lib, Devils particle system is ment to be quite good, and its free. I havn't used it though so I can't swear by it, only becuase I haven't toched anything since I started using particle candy.
For example, Sprite Candy, the sister package of particle candy, is over 12000 lines of code. It costs about £10, the minimum wage in the UK is £5.50
That means to justify the cost of not buying it, I would have to produce 12000 working lines of code, documentation and bug fixes in under 2 hours.......
If you want to program a particle system as a learning experiance, then by all means do so. If you want something that you can quickly get particles into your game, then always buy the lib.
Other than that, try a free lib, Devils particle system is ment to be quite good, and its free. I havn't used it though so I can't swear by it, only becuase I haven't toched anything since I started using particle candy.