Well, the emitter code is in, and you can now play with actually spraying particles around. I’ve included a sample of what you can do by messing with the color values. It’s a little inefficient, though, if you spawn a whole lot of particles. On my computer, it drops to 60 FPS at 10,000 particles being processed per frame. I’m just not really sure if that’s good enough or not.
Some notes on use:
First of all, type in a number and hit enter to change whatever value is red. Click on the names on the left to change which value is selected. Click twice to pick the value in the second column.
The first column (VAL) is the overall value, the second column (VAR) is how much randomness there is for that value. Values are evenly distributed throughout that range, though I’m considering changing that.
For the values where a graph shows up on the bottom, draw on it with the mouse. The X axis is the lifetime of the particle. It doesn’t update the emitter immediately when you change the graph like it does when you type in new numbers, though- to force it to update, hit “R”, for “refresh”. Also hit “R” if it is flickering or displaying giant colored boxes- it does that sometimes, I’m pretty sure I know why, but I haven’t fixed it yet.
Valid values for “texture” are 0 through 16. I particularly recommend 8, and 15 and 16 are good once you’ve set up some color changing stuff with the RGB graphs. Those two are the only two new textures, the rest of them are just textures that were already being loaded for other stuff.
The top value is now how many milliseconds it waits per spawn. Values between zero and one are valid.
“Acceleration” doesn’t do anything right now.
The VAR value for “ejection dir” will change how wide a spray it is. It’s in degrees. The VAL will change what the main direction is.
The lifetime of the particle is actually measured in ms, but displays in seconds for simplicity. So for 1 second, you actually have to type in 1000.
Hit “E” to export your values to emitter.txt, or “X” to export the “expanded” values- for every ms in the lifetime of the particle, the varying values are precomputed and saved in the “expanded” version.
So, up next: enable viewing multiple emitters at once for building more complex effects, and write the loading function, so you can load emitters instead of just saving them.
