Particle Effects Without Particles
Particle effects are made by taking a lot of small bitmaps and varying their location and attributes over time. The resulting ‘animation’ can look like fire, smoke, or nearly anything else you like.
Normally when coding these you create a small particle class or struct, and it holds things like position, color, direction, acceleration, alpha, scale, etc. These properties change each update which makes them ‘come alive’. You then assemble a bunch of these particles into ‘effects’ or some such thing. To leave a trail, or create blowing smoke, you can drop a series of these effects.
Our approach is similar, but we don’t use a particle class. Instead we use a random number between 0 and 1, and an equation. The random number is used to vary an effect, otherwise they can look very symetrical. So for example the alpha can be (255 * nextRandom()) to have it vary between invisible and visible. To make it also fade in, it can be (255 * nextRandom * t). To make it ease out on fading it can be (255 * nextRandom * Easing.FadeOutQuad(t, 255, 0)). I think you get the idea.
So instead of particles, there is just a calculation waiting to happen. Not having to deal with individual particle instances or state allows you to do things like change the particle count on the fly (by simply changing the loop size), or reverse time by changing ‘t’.
For anyone who does Flash, I’m sure the Easing idea is familiar. Robert Penner’s easing equations are universally popular, as they allow people to easily add tweening, fading and bouncing from code. I’m basing the equations on these, and adding a few non easing ones that are useful for particles (trig functions, weird functions, etc).
Rather than store the random numbers for each particle (which would require a particle class), we store the random seed and regenerate the same sequence of random numbers each update. This may sound slow, but reasonable random number generation can be surprisingly simple and blazingly fast (one billion numbers in 1.8 seconds on a p4!). We are using the FastRandom class by Colin Green which is really fast, and a drop in replacement for System.Random. This allows resetting the random seed without penalty. This is important as we reset the seed every update in order to get the same random number sequence time. It is also easy to extend – we have added saving state, so for example we can start at the 500th random number of a given seed without going through the first 499. Awesome code, I’d recommend using it for anything random in your game.
Note this code is available at http://www.codeplex.com/swf though the particle part hasn’t yet been added (using git locally, so it is a pain).
Here are some quick demo videos, I’d like to say they will clear up this crappy explanation, but I’ve seen them.
Part 1
Part 2
This looks like so much fun. Have you had anyone wanting to work with this? Are you going to license this engine? How hard would it be for me to work with?
It looks sooo usable compared to other engines I have worked with.
Very nice work. Sandy had mentioned you were having some fun with this.
smiles . . .