Particle Billboards

Description

A little demo that shows how to display quite a few more particles without the need for too many extra particle calculations.

Features

• Easily import into your projects
• Documentation included
• Two demos: simple and shader-based

Simple

• Derive your own generators and billboards from the included objects obj_generator and obj_display
• Full particle system is updated only once per step per generator
• obj_generator automatically recreates surfaces and redraws frames when needed (e.g. fullscreen switch)
• Create a particle system in an obj_generator's Create event, call render_all_frames() a first time and you're ready to link billboards to the generator
• Retrieve and display total displayed particle count

Shader-based

• Offloads CPU by executing all billboard draw code in a shader
• Uses a single texture and vertex buffer per particle system
• Derive new particle billboard systems from obj_pbb_gen_disp
• obj_pbb_gen_disp automatically recreates surfaces and redraws frames when needed (e.g. fullscreen switch)
• In an obj_pbb_gen_disp's Create event, assign particles to system sys, add a few billboards using pbb_add_billboard() and call render_all_frames()
• Debugging: retrieve and display total displayed particle count, display texture contents

Improvements to come

• Proper HTML5 support
• Rectangular billboard dimensions when using the shader-based version

Documentation and examples

• Documentation
• Examples (GMZ)

End User Licence Agreement (EULA).

Age Rating: None