Been recently playing with the JME ParticleEmitter… it does good what it does, but… it does not what it does not… in other words, it does not give enough features to control the particles. Am I supposed to extend its functionality with ParticleEmitterControls? Or is there any other recommended particle emitter to use? Or is the only option - to write my own one?
Yeah, ParticleEmitterControls or your own. Also don’t forget you can combine multiple emitters to achieve a certain effect.
1 Like
You can take a look at Tonegod’s “force-base” ParticleEmitter, it even come with an Editor .
I also have some snippets for advance “force-base” ParticleSystem and can be exchanged with standard JME ParticleEmitter and also can be import from some Emitter editor program.
But first I think I want to know what features you want for your effects. Because more parameters don’t make it look better if you don’t understand how it will composed or don’t have a tool to make it!
Yes, I saw some mentions of some new emitters but never really saw anything that would be stated as the replacement for the standard one 
hence me asking of any more defined recommendations…
And yes, you’re completely right about knowing what am I to do with the emitter. Well, I would like it to be more apt for control with forces over time. Or maybe give some intelligence to each particle. Also I would like to have much more control over an individual particle. For example, I would like to make particles varying in their evolution of color (the standard emitter only allows a uniform linear color translation over a particles lifetime). Actually, all this starts to look like not a description of a particle emitter, but rather a particle system…
So I wonder, is it worth trying to apply all such things to the standard emitter using emitter controls and combining a number of emitters for complex effects (just as @normen advised, really building complex effects out of simple ones is very sane for most cases). Or do I better invest into building my emitter from scratch… ? Or use the Tonegods one… or venture for a search of the mythic emitter once spoken about by Kirill Vainer… ?
Not sure which mythical particle system you’re referring to? There have been some attempts to write a better one, but they were all either abandoned or cancelled due to too much politics.
People always want more features than are available in any particle system, so the key is probably to make it sufficiently extensible. I don’t think such extensibility features could actually be added to the current system without making the API very ugly or breaking backwards compatibility.
If were to do this in the core, it would probably be best to rewrite from scratch and then just convert the old emitters to the new system when the model is imported.
This particles contribution allow you to change the color in a non-linear way : http://wiki.jmonkeyengine.org/doku.php/jme3:contributions:particles
the link to the thread is dead on the wiki page. I didn’t manage to log in to edit though
so here is the link to the thread
http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/t/influencer-based-particleemitter-candidate-mesh-based-animated-particles
IMO we should entirely rewrite the particle system. To quote @normen “it’s an half assed system”. Because the influencer system only “push” particles in a direction at start and then hope for the best. The influencer should control the particle during its whole lifetime.
I guess that’s what @t0neg0d and @zarch did in their systems. At first this should have ended in an integration of one of those systems, but there has been a lot of drama around it and everything stopped.
For what it worth, it didn’t looks too much into the code, but I tested tonegod’s system and it was very powerful. Especially with the nice editor.
1 Like