Which one is the best particle system???
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/Which one is the best particle system???
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| Hi, Just curious to find out which one you all think is the best particle editor... And/Or system out for Blitz3D ??? I heard Particle Candy is hard to beat at the moment! |
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| What is Particle Candy? |
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| @jhocking Go here to find out ---- > http://www.x-pressive.com/ParticleCandy/ |
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| Feature list looks interesting, but there's no download. |
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| @jhocking Im' sorry man! Try the above link again! |
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| Thanks. This looks interesting. I'll have to look in the source to see how easy the system is to use, because if it is pretty easy then this looks to be worth the cost. ADDITION: So, you a salesman for those guys? Because the demo floored me! The effects were superb, and the code to setup particle effects is dead simple. |
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| I'm taking a look. Can the real xpressive please stand up? who are you? :) |
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| @jhocking Thanks. This looks interesting. I'll have to look in the source to see how easy the system is to use, because if it is pretty easy then this looks to be worth the cost. This is a really simple particle system to use with the power it has to offer the end user! And yes this is very interesting indeed! ADDITION: So, you a saleman for those guys? Because the demo floored me! The effects were superb, and the code to setup particle effects is dead simple. Nope! Im' not a salesman for nobody! And yes the demos are very impressive indeed! The effects are superb & the code setup is very simple where anybody can use this system! @Rob I'm taking a look. Can the real xpressive please stand up? who are you? :) Im' just like you guys here! Im' just a regular Blitz3D user trying to find great tools to help my projects as well! If you guys didn't know about this application... Then Im' very happy that I managed to direct you towards this fantastic website with such a cool particle effects engine and/or system! But then again... I created this post to hopfully bring all the particle systems together for a compairson to see which one will be the best of them all! Anyways guys! Im' glad I could help other fellow Blitz Users on here! Your Welcome indeed! If you buy this system... Make some cool demos for me to download to add to my collection! *smiles* |
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| It's pretty DAMN sweet. |
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| It sure is!!! Im' thinking about buying a lisence today! Let's see what I can come up with this in combonation with the use of gile[s] on the other side! |
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| I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but I think you're being suckered in by pretty demos. :-) This system doesn't do a whole lot that my particle system (which I am no longer selling) did not do. Nor is it any easier to set up. In fact the documentation just seems to make it more confusing than it would probably be if you just looked at the code. The demos are really really nice, I'll give you that. And it might be faster than my system was because it is single surface. But you've been able to do effects like these in Blitz for a while. And single surface systems like this generally can't render 3D particles. Those rocks are just sprites. Oh, and there's a particle system called EOLE I think which is also single surface. It's made by that french guy that did the nice GUI system. That can pretty much do what this system can do. And it's free. And comes with an editor with a GUI which lets you save the parameters of a particular effect. Of course feature for feature, maybe this system has some additional features which you'd find useful. Hard to say without looking at the functions to see all the various parameters that are available. But stunning effects like these are all a matter of using the right parameters, and the right art, and using multiple types of particles at once to create interesting variation. |
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| I AM getting suckered willingly. Why? because it includes the premade effects like sparks and torches. When I pay for a system, I want to pay for all the HARD WORK and that means such a system MUST have loads of premade effects. at £17 UKBP, I think it's affordible, unlike your system was :) Plus you're just jealous! |
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| I bought ParticleCandy system for my game few days ago... like said here, demos were great and the whole ideology is very close to what we have at work... and having secondary effects is a BIG plus, it's so easy to make huge and gorgeus explosions among other things. I do have a licence for Sswifts system too, but I still think that getting PC (Particle Candy) was in the end better choice for me. One main difference (in addition it being a single-surface system) was that PC is a true commercial product with proper website, support and development with free upgrades. It seems to get also updates quite regularly and is being developed according to the Blitz community wishes and needs... bit like gile[s], which rocks too. [edit] And PC has SOUNDS associated to the effect too, which is so cool... no need to set those up for yourself "manually" for every gooddamn explosion. :) The author seems to prefer BlitzCoder, so many here might have missed his system: http://www.blitzcoder.com/cgi-bin/ubb-cgi/postdisplay.cgi?forum=Forum3&topic=001422 http://www.blitzcoder.com/cgi-bin/ubb-cgi/postdisplay.cgi?forum=Forum1&topic=003555 |
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| "at £17 UKBP, I think it's affordible, unlike your system was :)" The site said the price was like $30 US. That's like 3x as much as I was ever charging for my particle system. :-) And jealous? Of what? I'm not selling my system anymore, so it's not like I'm trying to get you to buy mine. :-) I still haven't decided if I will or should ever develop my Firestorm system, which was to be the single surface sucessor to my old system. There's so much competition and there really is only so much you can do with a particle system that people would actually make use of. |
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| Hi You can try my free particle system at http://n-eole.chez.tiscali.fr/EPS2.htm |
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| EPS rocks |
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| yea, ive always liked EPS. SSwift, however, i am a great fan of your libraries, generally due to the over whelming amount of commenting so i can learn how you do everything. any idea when your next particle system is going to be ready (i think when i emailed you, you said you were working on a new one?) aCiD2 |
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| cant get any particles on the screen in EPS after pressing start |
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| Particle Candy looks nice indeed, and above all the demos are very well done. But I tend to agree with Swift here. It's true that getting impressive effects is really a matter of doing some trials until you get the right effect. So that's a bit overpriced IMHO, especially with good free particle systems out there. Just an opinion. Again, on the feature and ease of use side alone, that looks like a real good library. |
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| I don't think Eole's particle system is single surface, which makes a big difference ( for me. ) Like Rob, I also felt that pre-made effects were vital in order to make me buy a system. Not only does it mean I don't have to do the hard work to get common effects up and running, it gives me a starting point to create my own effects, particularly since Particle Candy allows you to combine effects. EG: You could rip the smoke out and use it in combination with some sparks or fire or an explosion. I never saw SSwift's particle system, but Particle Candy does have a lot of power and flexibility. It may be true that you could create particle effects as good as this for a long time. But no one ever HAS done in anything I've downloaded. Now someone has, and he's packaged it in such a way that I can too. It's true that Particle Candy doesn't come with a GUI-driven effects editor. But you could always write your own. It only took a few days to get this far :  |
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| "yea, ive always liked EPS. SSwift, however, i am a great fan of your libraries, generally due to the over whelming amount of commenting so i can learn how you do everything." I'm glad you like them. :-) "any idea when your next particle system is going to be ready (i think when i emailed you, you said you were working on a new one?)" As I said above, with all the competition, I'm not really that inclined at the moment to develop the single surface Firestorm particle system I was working on. If I do eventually create it, it'll be for fun, not because I expect to make much off it. I suppose I could compete with these other system favorably if I made a really good editor and a lot of predefined effects, but it'd be tough to make my system stand out from the rest. And I'd have to make a bunch of really impressive demos too to show it off like Particle Candy has. My time would probably be better spent making a new terrain system or something. Better to spend my time on something that others haven't already done mostly right. |
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| I'm a little torn on whether or not to buy this. If you need fancy particle effects then Particle Candy looks like a good buy. But I don't need those effects at the moment, so I'd mostly be buying it to add to my bag of tricks. Still, several times I've had the experience of kicking myself because I didn't purchase a tool when it was available, and now that I need it the tool isn't available anymore. "Nor is it any easier to set up." @ sswift: Sorry to be replying to your first post, but I wanted to point out that, from looking at the demo code, Particle Candy is WAY easier to set up than other Blitz particle systems I've seen. I haven't seen yours mind you, but this is definitely easy to setup. Just define an emitter (with parameters to define the particles it emits and how frequently to emit them,) then call UpdateParticles every frame; the include code handles everything else. From using your shadow system I imagine your particle system worked the exact same way, but most of the particle systems I've seen are a darn sight more complicated. |
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| "but most of the particle systems I've seen are a darn sight more complicated." Yes but most particle systems includes a lot of ones that weren't really designed well for other people to use. Like a lot of free ones on the code archives. I haven't actually looked carefully at EOLE's, but I have seen his GUI code and I know it too is emitter based. His code is nicely formatted and well thought out and easy to use, and I'm confident that his particle system is just as simple to use as Candy or my system was. |
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| Thank sswift ! Actualy my particle system is base on sprite, because single surface are more slower than build-in sprite. But I think to create an EPS 3.0 where you will be able to use objects |
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| Actualy my particle system is base on sprite, because single surface are more slower than build-in sprite. Not on any PC I've ever used Blitz on. As SSwift said in another thread, a few hundred sprite particles and your frame rate drops significantly. With a single surface particle system, you can multiply that by ten. Just tested and Particle Candy renders 4000 particles at over 130fps ( never drops below 130 ) on my system. There's no way a sprite-based particle system would achieve that. |
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| To All... Did anybody get any "Partical Candy" for Easter yesterday??? Because I didn't and I want some!!! |
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| This Particle Candy does look interesting. I've been using Birdie's system from the original Blitz samples and I've been aware I'm going to have to pull that out at some stage (sprite based - not enough features), but I've been wanting something as simple to implement/replace and this syetm could be the one... |
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| I like it. I wrote to the author and he wrote back saying basically they are working on a game at the moment, and when the game's finished, he plans on more of those premade effects for all to use. He also said he might add new features like terrain collision for bouncing particles. |
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| Great!!!! |
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