Messages

496

SFML projects / Re: Thor 2.0

« on: May 08, 2012, 05:06:04 pm »

I've been thinking about passing RenderStates via the draw method, and I thought maybe it would be better to pass a pointer to a RenderStates object at construction of a particle system (like you currently do with a texture). That way you can set the texture/blendmode/shader once for the whole particle system, and don't have to worry about overriding the texture when drawing. For instance I use BlendAdd for fire particles, BlendMultiply for a smoke particle system and I could also create a system with a glow shader for making lasers and things. Just an idea.

I'm going to try deriving my own affector tonight too... I had an idea for one which scales particles based on their velocity so slower particles look smaller and therefore further away - a kind of fake 'depth' effect.  We'll see how it goes

497

SFML projects / Re: Thor 2.0

« on: May 05, 2012, 09:20:43 pm »

OK, I shall have a think about how I might do it. I didn't define any of my own distributions (yet) but I like the concept - it's a great way to quickly and easily add variations to a particle system. It definitely beats any of my personal solutions which would involve things like

#define RANDOM_SPREAD rand() % screenWidth, rand() % screenHeight

(ok not a great example but you see what I mean) which I'd normally come up with - I'm a C programmer really, mainly doing embedded software and I'm using SFML to write *fun* things and learn C++   It's a very elegant solution.

498

SFML projects / Re: Thor 2.0

« on: May 05, 2012, 05:51:00 pm »

I was just wondering - is it possible to tie emitters to particles? For example if I wanted to explode a vehicle could I use a particle system to emit 4 or 5 particles as 'chunks' of the vehicle, then have each of those particles emit their own smoke and flame? Perhaps this is a reason to use GetPosition() on particles? I really like the idea of Distributions by the way, I've created some really good looking (if I say so myself ) smoke effects this afternoon

499

SFML projects / Re: Thor 2.0

« on: May 05, 2012, 11:26:14 am »

Hey there!
I downloaded Thor yesterday and have been playing with it for a while, it's a great lib One thing that struck me though was that I felt it was a bit inflexible to render particle systems to a RenderWindow only, so I changed

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ParticleSystem::draw(sf::RenderWindow& renderWindow) to

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ParticleSystem::draw(sf::RenderTarget& renderTarget, sf::RenderStates& renderStates)This way I can render a particle system to a RenderTexture as well as a RenderWindow, change the BlendMode and use shaders for post FX during off screen rendering. Sorry if I've missed something and there's already a better way to do this, but I've only been using Thor for a few hours. I will definitely being using this lib a lot