| Submitted by , posted on 28 December 2001 |

Image Description, by These are a few pictures of the particle system that I've been writing over the past few days. The top left picture is the standard flame type particle effect that you see in most pictures of particle systems. The top right picture is of a cool nebula effect that I stumbled upon while playing around with the settings. Below that picture is nice little water fountain.
Finally the two pictures in the bottom left are of another nice effect that I discovered. The upper picture shows a funny little wobbling star and the lower image (after a few changes to the settings) shows that same star exploding.
A lot of the main particle system code itself is based upon the source code to Richard Benson's Particle Chamber (sorry, can't find his website) so a lot of the credit should go to him. The main things I've changed is convert it to VB and add support for DX8 point sprites.
Now you may be asking "Why VB?" Well there's a simple answer to this. VB is a great platform for testing ideas out and it's also the programming language I know most about. I'm still learning to use DirectX and I'm not that familiar with C++ so why make it hard for myself and try to learn two things at once?
Current speed of the particle engine (which you may be able to see in some of the screenshots so I won't lie ;) is about 45fps with 1000 particles on a 1Ghz Athlon with GeForce 2 GTS. Comparing the speeds with Richard Benson's Particle Chamber they are only about 10% to 20% slower. (more than likely because of VB)
The code at the moment is totally un-optimised and a lot of it is basically a hack so there's no public executable or source at the moment. Once I've cleaned it up a bit I'll update my (VERY out of date) website at http://www.mfoggin.btinternet.co.uk/.
Matt

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