OpenGL Particle System Demo 2 - Wind Waker styled Explosions

[erionmema1]

sounds like fart but cool though

[FibrousAcquiescence]

@erionmema1 You must have some hellish farts then =P

[sutasman]

Oooh looks nice :) Particle systems I've done in the past have been exactly they way you have done it, as shown by your pseudocode. However it took me a while to realise that reusing objects was way quicker than creating and deleting them haha. Keep up the good work.

[stickmeister0]

I'm going into use a faster and orange version without the rocks and place it into Team Fortress 2.

This is well-done. Very nice.

[ilmale]

COOL.

Thank you for the explanation.

[TheForce]

Very cool.

[lorentsg]

how do you do your particle-sorting? (and rendering)

[AsymmetricArt]

My particle system is actually very simple. In pseudo code: (__ is to be interpreted as a tab) create n particles and place them in list P for every p in P __ p.dead = TRUE while particle system active __ if there is a particle p in P which satisfies p.dead == TRUE ____ p.dead = FALSE ____ give it position: x0, y0, z0 ____ give this particle a directional vector and some "energy" __ for each particle i in P ____ if it's energy is 0 ____ p.dead = TRUE __ else ____ updateParticle(i)

[AsymmetricArt]

I have a finite amount of particles in each system, where they are either dead or alive. New particles are created from the buffer full of dead particles as long as the system is "active" In the case of an explosion - all particles are flagged as alive immediately and the system is flaged as inactive immediately thereafter. A fountain on the other hand would allways be active and have most of it's particles (ideally for a good flow) dead and awaiting to be resurrected.

[AsymmetricArt]

Having a finite amount of particles instead of creating and destroing "particle objects" has two advantages - first, it's faster, and second, if I would create particles too fast I don't end up trashing the system, the system simply stops emitting new particles when all particles are alive at the same time.

[AsymmetricArt]

updateParticle() is a function specific to that particle system. This is where the particles new position, rotation, size, texture, tint, and any other changes are calculated based on the particles mass, energy, and other data contained in the p struct.

[AsymmetricArt]

What makes the different particle systems behave differently is different applications of physical "laws". Note that the "laws" are not at all realistic and very simplified to increase the speed of computation. By varying the mass, air resistance, initial velocity etc. I can create different effects.

[AsymmetricArt]

There is no "particle sorting" involved as each system is responsible for one kind of particles only. The Wind Waker explosion consists of 4 separate particle systems - each with their own specific updateParticle() function.

[AsymmetricArt]

Rendering is very simple. I just tell the OpenGL rendering engine to draw a polygon centered at a position given by the particle p. Scale of the polygon is determined by it's size. The p struct may also contain information about the rotation, tint, transparency, texture and so on. I do this for each particle p in every active particlesystem once every 1/60th of a second.

[fistp]

Cool.

Looks kinda like Peter Max animations.

[crumby99]

Nice job! I loved those stylized cloud "poofs" in the Wind Waker. Are you using this particle system in any upcoming projects??

[AsymmetricArt]

I'm probably going to use it for a game, but that's a long way into the future.

[AsymmetricArt]

meh.. audio seems to be out of sync...