C2 Particle Generator

hello everyone:

i have noticed that for there are a couple of software tools created in GameMaker that give their developers on that platform a quick GUI interface for creating/testing different particles and exporting the underlying pseudo-code into GameMaker for their games.

granted C2 is more powerful, versatile, and inherently GUI compared to GameMaker; but nonetheless, is there a tool/software for C2 that lets you quickly click on a few buttons and "test"/compare particles?

thank you in advance for your help.

There isn't a dedicated tool for this, but particle effects are so easy to set up that I recommend you create a separate layout for testing purposes. Just drag in your various particle objects and play with the settings until you get what you want.

PS: Not sure what your intentions are, but I just thought I'd warn you that particle effects kill performance on mobile, so stay away (or tone them down massively) if that's your intended platform.

thanks a million; i appreciate the heads-up on the original question and the advice on performance hit for mobile devices (i did not know that, and that's one of the intended platforms)...based on your performance advice, i have to now reconsider development (taking out particles, substituting other "eye candy").

It's not impossible to get away with a few particles, but the two things they do best - spewing out massive numbers of sprites and altering the opacity of those sprites - are two of the biggest performance-hitters on mobile (physics is the other big one).

It depends on what you want to do, I suppose. If you're using particle emitters for fire or smoke effects, you might want to use animated sprites instead. A few blood or spark spatters here and there should be fine though.