Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
How it works
The whole creation of a particle system or a particle file is very easy as discussed earlier.
But the effort lies in fine-tuning the properties of the particle emitters, something similar to
an anatomy of the particle system we can say. Every particle system has many different
properties influencing the look, feel, and behavior of the individual particles and the
particle system as one.
So to play with an particle system file the following values are changed accordingly
thereby resulting in an effect of particles of the feel we want. The following is a list of
properties described with what happens to the particle system if these are changed.
•
Background
: This is the background of the particle editor. It is just saved at the
built time but not reflected during runtime.
•
Particle Texture
: This is an image or asset texture used as a particle image to
render the overall particle system.
•
ParticleBirthRate
: This is the number of particles generated every second of the
system.
•
Maximum Particles
: This is the number of particles that an emitter has to gener-
ate totally; for value zero, infinite stream of particles are generated.
•
LifeTime
: This is the average lifetime of a particle before it vanishes from the
screen; the value is inserted in seconds.
•
Position Range
: This is the average starting position of a particle.
•
Emitter Angle
: This is the average initial direction of a particle. It means the angle
at which the particle has to be emitted.
•
Particle Speed and Range
: This is the speed at which the particles should move
and there is also a
SpeedRange
parameter; for example, if it is equal to 50 and
speed is 100, then the values of speed will vary from 50 (100 - 50) to 150 (100 +
50).
•
Acceleration
: These are for both
x
(horizontal) and
y
(vertical) accelerations.
•
Alpha
: This is the initial alpha set for the particles and it also has a range paramet-
er to specify.
•
Scale
: This is the initial scale factor provided for the particle that is, the size of the
particle.
•
Rotation
: This is the initial rotation of a particle.
•
Color Blend
: In this whole section, some blend modes are provided by specifying
the average initial color of the particle.
