My particle system, used in Madness: The Stand, was getting a bit rusty - it offers a lot of great effects but i need something better for the game I'm working right now. A lot better. So last Friday while taking a break from developing my skeletal animation system, I decided to write a new one. It's almost perfect for action game usage - mainly for explosions, fire, sparks and smoke effects. It's 70% done.

It features custom collision detection based on raycasting in box2d world(10 to 100 times faster than using box2d's circles as particles (as seen in Madness: The Stand)) so it's an epic win. Every effect will have collision detection on by default - usually even our precious AAA console and pc titles don't offer this(reach,killzone 2&3,mafia 2,crysis,uncharted being some of the exceptions) so every action fan will be fully satisfied, i hope. They still need some tweaking but I already like what i see.

Another awesome thing is animated movieclip bitmap caching(based on what you can see in Scary Girl - the game). The stress test I'm showing here has a 90 frames long smoke animation made of 6 gfx with high quality blur and alpha tweens - it's so intense that flash struggles to display one instance of it as a normal movieclip. But with the caching system, it allows for much more than 100 on screen at once. Also some particles are circles with high quality glow - exactly 400 of them (in the demo) and no framerate drop. I will be using this in the whole engine - the game will look better,be more intense and will be around 10 times faster!(smooth 30-60 instead of 3-6 fps sounds awesome, huh?). If you've been working on a game or animation and wanted to make some really beautiful effects with filters - you might know how bad it feels when everything slows down. Not anymore, bitch!

The demo also shows some rope and plant quasi-physics with collisions. Cloth with UV mapping will be also featured.

So have fun, i hope that u'll be as excited as me for this game - tell me what kind of framerate drops are you getting with one explosion, also it may be super choppy in Opera browser(maybe because of encryption) and stay put! The game will be intense.

(click to focus and press space for instant explosion)

PARTICLE DEMO