Editing ParticleEmitters in JMP(SceneComposer) is all fine and dandy, as long as you want constantly emitting emitters, ie a steady flow of particles.
I find it a bit limiting though, when i want to create one time effects (like explosions and such) for two reasons:
It’s not possible to set “number of particles” after the ParticleEmitter has been activated.(it crashes the SceneViewer)
Even if it was possible, there is no way to activate “emitAllParticles()”, so you wouldn’t be able to see anything. A “Toggle Emitter” button or something would be nice.
There is a third reason as well, “timing of several emitters”, but that’s a whole different chapter
I think the above two suggestions would greatly improve the tool for making pretty effects in jme.
For me it was possible to edit that number, I often used it to shut down particle emitters as the Enable function did not work for me (nightly from a week ago), might have changed, but I’m all for a button to test explosions and such. Also, I believe there is no way of testing how a moving emitter looks like, other than adding gravity to mimic the idea. Perhaps we can create a test function like a bezier curve to follow as a way to see how it looks on the move? Usually nice to check that out to get the number of particles emitted and the trail of an object just right.
Oh, and a minor one: Whenever I create a new particle emitter, the number of pictures horizontally is set to 15 on default, I doubt that number will occur very often, perhaps you can set the default to 1? It’s 1 for the vertical # as well. May have been fixed in the last couple of days, I’ve been unable to update ofc
Because it messes up the particles without the animation. I see really hard edges of the particle images ending on the sides until I put that value to 1, I mean, it looks like it takes a 1/15th of the horizontal image to me, even when animation is off. That is, if you load a partcle with a nice material (image) on it ofc, nothing visible if you just leave it without any material.
Handles are in the latest nightly, just click the “move” button and grab the colored squares. Does it really use the “images” value for non-animated images? I never recognized that, but thats kind of silly if it is so.
As you can see you now have a button in the properties panel to emit all particles.
For some reason i don’t get, once the button is clicked the font color is white, and some time the button is just half displayed…but anyway, clicking on it always work.
Setting the number of particles does not fail anymore, this was a bug in ParticleEmitter, also there was a problem when loading previously saved emitters in j3o files, it’s fixed now (@rickard this could be the reason why you had all these errors with your emitters…anyway it wasn’t helping :p).
Also I was thinking of a way to emit all particles of all emitters in the scene as effects has often more than one emitter. This could helpt to test effects like explosions.
Maybe adding a panel to the scene composer with tools for effects.
