I have seen many particle systems released on many different blogs. I’ve always thought that they were pretty cool and I’ve thought multiple times about making one myself, but decided not to for the single reason that I didn’t want to be just the next guy to jump on the bandwagon of things that have already been done. But, after seeing Seb Lee-Delisle’s presentation on particle systems at Flash on the Beach ‘07, I became a little more interested in doing it. Then, at the end of Robert Hodgin’s extremely cool presentation about processing, he left us with one simple image:
I don’t want to make the same crap that everyone else has been making, but I feel like you need somewhere to start. If a particle system was a good enough starting spot for Hodgin, it is for me to. So, on the plane ride home yesterday, I made my particle system from scratch. I didn’t want to look at anyone else’s code or algorithms, for better or worse, I just wanted to go for it. So, this may or may not be the most efficient way to do it, but here it is:
More work on this to come in the near future…
Pretty nice example! I hope you’re still working on this area – I’m interested to see the progress you’ve made
Left by Vyper on January 4th, 2008
Are you using a sprite factory/recycler to handle your particles? It looks like the garbage collector working every so often causing stutters in your particle movement. A factory would fix this.
Left by brad on March 11th, 2008
A factory is a great suggestion Brad. I planned on working a little more on performance and magnetism in the next release, but like many things, got distracted by other projects ;o)
Thanks for the suggestion.
Left by Nate Chatellier on March 11th, 2008