Spanking new Particle Engine

Anyway, please come in, pull up a chair and sit down .. fancy a brew?

For those of you who don't know, I've been involved in the development of a game called Strategem which is a turn-based strategy game with a difference ... major fun with major FX!

During the course of the development it has become pretty obvious that to pull-off the kind of special-fx we need for some of our board creatures, their battling and the use of magical powers within the realm, we need not only an intuitive but flexible method of creating special-fx, specifically particles.

The stock particle engine provides adequate features for simple effects such as basic fire and smoke, even precipitation effects but these can be difficult and in some cases, damn near impossible to achieve easily. At best, the particle effects are embedded within another C++ object to control emissions for the particular task. This is understandable as it wasn't written to be a do-it-all particle engine in the first place.

This has driven the need for me to take the bull by the horns and come up with a new way of getting the huge quantity of effects needed for our game.

During the last year, in parallel with Strategem development, I've spent a considerable amount of time researching all relevant areas of particle systems from offline rendering systems to realtime ones e.g. WonderTouchs 'Particle Illusion' or Max Paynes' 'Particle-FX'. I've focused not only on their features but also more importantly, the user interfaces, in particular features such as being able to set many attributes with a catmull-rom spline graph over unit-time as per 'Particle-FX'.

An area of particle generation that I've focused on is the ability to have a particle engine that can simulate more complex and dynamic effects where emitters move ballistic paths and don't simply generate from fixed points, planes or various volumes. Another critical feature was the ability to reuse particle definitions and form a library system where particles, emissions and overall effects can be reused. This leads to not only a neat feature but performance benefits as well.

To this end, I've come up with a system that I think rivals most, if not all, realtime particle systems and some offline ones as well. A pretty bold statement but this is more than talk and I will bring this to demo sometime early next year, you can count on that.

>>> Continued on next post ...