Particle System Update 2

Download this game here.

Controls:

• Esc – Exit.
• Shift – Toggle object’s geometry.
• Backspace – Toggle between controlled camera/object.
• Arrow Keys – Move camera/object.

1. Goals
   • For this second sprint, I was looking to finish off the particle system’s movement and develop a human-readable file format for my users to create custom emitters.
   • To prepare for different types of emitters, I have been researching different things I can do to increase the use cases of this system.
2. Changes & Additions
   • Removed the emitterSize variable from my cEmitter class.
     • This simplifies the interface as well as the , since my particles won’t be colliding with anything else in the scene.
   • Removed the identifiers array from the cEmitter class.
     • This lessens the amount of data saver per particle, and although it will reduce the ability for gameplay engineers to keep track of an individual particle, this will simplify calculations.
   • Added PickUnitSpherePoint to cEmitter class.
     • Uniformly distributes on the unit sphere for velocity and acceleration, and returns an sVector of length one.
     • Removed cEmitter.
       • Replaced it with cEmitterPoint, an emitter that’s source is a singular point in space.
       • Replaced it with cEmitterPlane, an emitter that’s source is a defined bounds within the xy plane.
     • Added IEmitter abstract class.
       • This will allow for different types of emitters to be used.
       • Holds minCount, maxCount, particleLifetime, minVel, maxVel, minAcc, maxAcc, minRot, maxRot, body, and transforms as public members of the interface.
       • Has Predict and ParticleCount as public functions.
       • Has Update as a virtual function.
         • This allows the particles to be managed by the type of particle system that is being run.
     • Added EmitterBuilder project to Tools.
       • This project will create the binary files to use in the game.
3. How I Did It
   • By creating an interface for the emitter class, I hope to provide the users of this system a better range of uses.
     • Later into the process, I have been considering if it would be easier to go back to one class that can handle different cases, perhaps according to an enum.
       • This would make the binary file processing easier and avoid confusion about what types to use.
   • Looking at what might be crowding my class, I hope to make it easier to use in the future.
4. Up Next
   1. Develop binary particle files and reading ability.
   2. Develop human-readable file format.
   3. Add more functionality.
5. Future Plans
   1. Simplify the emitter further, to make it easier for the game creators and make it better for usage.