particles! particles! particles!

As some of you might have noticed in our last video, we have started putting particles in our game. For the non-developers out there, particles are how we create effects such as explosions, weather, dust or any situation where we need to animate some kind of graphical effect using many graphics moving together in a certain way. We are using an excellent particle library called Particle Universe which allows you to create these effects in a script type format. Here are a couple of effects I have been working on lately using this system.



Here is a snippet of the script of the bottom explosion effect, detailing how the system should animate the fireball part of the explosion:


// --------------- fireball ---------------
technique
{
use_alias $defaultBillboardRenderer
material fireball
default_particle_width 25
default_particle_height 25
visual_particle_quota 500
emitter Point
{
emission_rate 1
force_emission true
velocity 0
time_to_live 1
}

// expand quickly then slow
affector Scale
{
xyz_scale dyn_curved_linear
{
control_point 0 1
control_point 0.1 4500
control_point 0.3 500
}
}
// change color over time
affector Colour
{
colour_aff_time_colour 0 1 1 1
colour_aff_time_colour 0.1 1 1 1
colour_aff_time_colour 0.3 .8 .6 .6
colour_aff_time_colour 0.45 .2 .2 .2
colour_aff_time_colour 0.65 0 0 0
}
}