When rendering the particles, instead of the default destination blend mode of GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA, we use the GL_ONE (additive) blend mode that gives the particles a very neat glow effect when stacked onto each other. What's interesting to note here are the two calls to glBlendFunc. Here, for each particle, we set their offset and color uniform values, bind the texture, and render the 2D quad. GlBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA) ParticleShader.SetVector4f("color", particle.Color) ParticleShader.SetVector2f("offset", particle.Position)
![particle designer for game maker studio 2 particle designer for game maker studio 2](https://img.magimg.com/uploads/particledesigner.jpg)
What we want is to find the first particle that is dead (life 0.0f) This isn't really efficient considering only a small portion of that list has particles that are alive. If were to push all new particles to the end of the list we'll quickly get a list filled with thousands of particles. As particles die over time we want to spawn nr_new_particles particles each frame, but since we don't want to infinitely keep spawning new particles (we'll quickly run out of memory this way) we only spawn up to a max of nr_particles. The first loop may look a little daunting. Note that in the vertex shader we scale the particle quad by 10.0f you can also set the scale as a uniform and control this individually per particle.įirst, we need a list of particles that we instantiate with default Particle structs: We take the standard position and texture attributes per particle and also accept an offset and a color uniform for changing the outcome per particle. Gl_Position = projection * vec4((vertex.xy * scale) + offset, 0.0, 1.0) Ĭolor = (texture(sprite, TexCoords) * ParticleColor)
#Particle designer for game maker studio 2 generator#
Here, the particle generator spawns each particle at the ball's position, gives it a velocity equal to a fraction of the ball's velocity, and changes the color of the particle based on how long it lived.įor rendering the particles we'll be using a different set of shaders: In Breakout, we're going to add a simple particle generator that follows the ball to make it all look just a bit more interesting. You can imagine that with systems like these we can create interesting effects like fire, smoke, fog, magic effects, gunfire residue etc. After the particles have reached a certain height, their life is depleted and the particles are killed never reaching the stars. We can also see that the higher the y position of the particle, the less yellow or bright its color becomes. It seems to have 3 different regions, so it probably gives some particles a higher velocity than others. Looking at the fire example, the particle emitter probably spawns each particle with a position close to the emitter and with an upwards velocity. A particle generally has the following attributes: A particle emitter controls all its spawned particles and changes their behavior based on their attributes. Once its life is less than a certain threshold (usually 0), we kill the particle so it can be replaced with a new particle when the next particle spawns. If such a particle emitter would for example spawn tiny particles with a smoke-like texture, color them less bright the larger the distance from the emitter, and give them a glowy appearance, you'd get a fire-like effect:Ī single particle often has a life variable that slowly decays once it's spawned. When working with particles, there is usually an object called a particle emitter or particle generator that, from its location, continuously spawns new particles that decay over time. However, when you put together hundreds or even thousands of these particles together you can create amazing effects.
![particle designer for game maker studio 2 particle designer for game maker studio 2](https://marketplacecdn.yoyogames.com/images/assets/7152/screenshots/19696_original.png)
![particle designer for game maker studio 2 particle designer for game maker studio 2](https://koenig-media.raywenderlich.com/uploads/2017/12/ParticleSystem-feature.png)
A particle by itself is effectively just a sprite as we've been using extensively so far. A particle, as seen from OpenGL's perspective, is a tiny 2D quad that is always facing the camera (billboarding) and (usually) contains a texture with large parts of the sprite being transparent.