Textured particle features? (also, about the picture editor)

I can see that you can make particles use an image, but it doesn't seem like you can make them rotate the same way you can make them move around. it would be nice to have various features, like having particles rotate in the direction they're moving, or spin them, and other things. Another seemingly useful addition would be to use any number of random images for a single particle generator instead of using just one or none at all.

Another thing I'd like to point out and ask about is the picture editor. It seems really badly put together, with most buttons lacking descriptions (especially ones that do need them), scroll bars not actually staying in the window (they're half under the rest of the window!) and the "style" list for the shapes seems cut off, with only 4 selectable styles and what looks like a small piece of a 5th fill style. The rectangle that should be surrounding the style list is cut off like that as well.

I can see that you can make particles use an image, but it doesn't seem like you can make them rotate the same way you can make them move around.

The particles object is designed to be a faster alternative to using sprites. By using a single image and no rotations, the GPU can render particles about four times faster than with sprites. As soon as you start rotating them and changing textures you lose these advantages. We could add the features you ask for, but then the Particles object offers no advantages over using ordinary sprites, which would make it a bit redundant.

[quote:1q3htpw8]Another thing I'd like to point out and ask about is the picture editor.

Will see what we can do about that...

The particles object is designed to be a faster alternative to using sprites. By using a single image and no rotations, the GPU can render particles about four times faster than with sprites. As soon as you start rotating them and changing textures you lose these advantages. We could add the features you ask for, but then the Particles object offers no advantages over using ordinary sprites, which would make it a bit redundant.

I hardly see how you can say that, given that I wouldn't have a clue about the first thing to do if I had to do it without that particle object. Maybe you could offer an "advanced" particle object to make it easy to do those things without detracting from the original particle object's specialties?

[quote:2ptzoyk0]I hardly see how you can say that, given that I wouldn't have a clue about the first thing to do if I had to do it without that particle object. Maybe you could offer an "advanced" particle object to make it easy to do those things without detracting from the original particle object's specialties?

It's actually not hard at all - try spawning a load of sprites with a bullet movement from a point (use the accuracy for the cone of spray), and then you can make random adjustments to angle, speed or whatever. Still, I guess doing all that automatically would be useful. Maybe it could be expanded in future.

On a side note I do plan on adding additional features to the particle object. Ashley is right in saying that for more complicated situations its better to use sprites as you can control each object, debug them better, etc etc, but lots of people seem to be using particle objects in their games and I feel that being able to scale them and rotate them would improve the overall appearance of our games.

Basically I'll use the current method of rendering if there is no scaling and no rotation...otherwise I will use a simple blit (same as sprites do) to render the particles. However, this is likely to only be 1/4th of the speed, but it certainly would not be slower than using manual sprites.

[quote:ycaxw8eu]I hardly see how you can say that, given that I wouldn't have a clue about the first thing to do if I had to do it without that particle object. Maybe you could offer an "advanced" particle object to make it easy to do those things without detracting from the original particle object's specialties?

It's actually not hard at all - try spawning a load of sprites with a bullet movement from a point (use the accuracy for the cone of spray), and then you can make random adjustments to angle, speed or whatever. Still, I guess doing all that automatically would be useful. Maybe it could be expanded in future.

This is something I"m experimenting with so that this way, I can kinda have rain and other particle effects mess with the motion of physics objects... An automatic way of doing something like that would be great... but not too high priority IMO...

Is there no way you could just like tick a box in the object's properties to enable these things like rotations and collisions etc? I'm sure most of the time people won't want them all, and if you don't need them all then surely it will still be faster than using sprites, and therefore will still have a use. Then if you do want a particle object how it is now, without all this extra stuff slowing everything down, you just have all these things disabled and its just as fast as it ever was.