JUST WHAT I NEEDED! 
THANK YOU so much!
Okay, I have one question, and maybe this is like “DUH” but:
When you “record animation” do the particles or the partisystem whatever ALSO record animation, like, say when a jetfighter fires off it’s guns…?
At any rate, you just gave us flightsimrcanimators our guns!
I’m figuring how to download it from gameup but I can’t seem to find the link. I know, I’m probably doing something obviously wrong…
is another link you have or something?
- The particles most likely won’t be recorded in the animation, as the particles are added objects, and I think the ‘Record to F-Curve’ feature, if that is what you’re referring to, only works on objects in-game (not out of the game).
- The link here pointed to the wrong page - I fixed it. The download is at the bottom of the page.
Okay, I was able to get v1.6 from your YouTube video. Is that one pretty new, or should I really hold out for the newest build (when I can find it)
At any rate, this is exactly the idea I’ve been wanting.
The reason all this cropped up is what you said, the usual fps approach of adding an object from another layer to be the bullet.
I’m doing a dogfighting scene, lots of planes shooting lots of bullets…
How would you handle that? I want a gun that fires when I pull the trigger, but I want it to be recorded by the engine so that it becomes part of the scene’s animation.
Or are we to use the Andrew Price and the Asteroids approach of little things generated by a particle system outside the engine. Can get time consuming, especially when there’s a big dogfight and a lot of shooting…
Don’t mean to bitch. Just trying to simplify…
At any rate, I really appreciate what you’ve built. People like you coming up with brilliant new tools are really creating an amazing new wave of killer physical animation for fucking cheap! Filmmaking’s New Wave.:eyebrowlift2:
If you want to see the sort of situation I’m referring to, take my poll in the “works in progress” forum, “Today Mars, Tomorrow The Stars.” The second video on the page shows my flight test of the Martian Cavalier GunPod.
-
V1.6 is a bit older. The newest version is worth getting - here’s a link to it (V1.8).
-
Well, if you were going for more accurate bullets, you should just use a muzzle flash and a ray cast sensor - you wouldn’t actually see the bullet going through the air, and even if you were, I wouldn’t use the X-Emitter for that, so much, though it is capable of handling it.
-
Thanks.
Hey! Thank you for that link!
At any rate, I’m actually not doing bullets. I was kinda bulletted out after the new Battlestar Galactica.
This would probably be lightning bolts. I know there’s the new lightning bolt generator, but I haven’t been messing with it yet.
Just trying to think in general terms. I tend to use the game engine to create just about all of my physical animation in a scene. It’s much more like “Acting” to me than just moving keyframes around all day and dickin with graph editor.
And this is scifi. So… it seems to me that everything (just about) should happen in BGE, afterburners coming on and shutting off, guns blazing, the works.
The point is to make it very dashing, very rakish, very cut-throat fighterjock space opera…:eek:
SolarLune, I was expecting to see a ‘seed’ function added to the emitter! It seems it wasn’t done!
Edit: One more thing:
There’s a problem with the camera. It seems your system has a certain dependency on cameras. I change cameras often in game, and when I do that, the particles don’t show, at the right position!
I think that you wanted to avoid spawning particles where the camera is not looking…
Sorry, I forgot. Yeah, I actually I did have something in there to avoid spawning particles when the camera wasn’t looking. I’ll work on both of those right now.
Hey. I added seeds into the new version - X-Emitter V1.9. Also, you are correct about the dependency on the camera - it uses the scene’s current active camera, so I’m not sure why there would be an issue. Anyway, I deactivated that feature by default, now. You can get the new X-Emitter V1.9 featuring random seeds on the first post.
Thank you very much SolarLune!
I need to add different objects from the same emitter, I hope the seeds affect what objects are selected.
In you documentation, the ‘partobjchoose’ says (string, tuple of object…), how do I describe the tuple? like this? A, B, or [A, B] or (A, B) or {A, B}, I get errors no matter how I do it…
partobjchoose should be, like it says, a string, and a tuple (list) of an object. It should be like this:
[‘particle1name’, ‘particle2name’, …]
The Sparkle emitter is an example of how it works. The seed should affect which objects are selected, as well. If it doesn’t, tell me.
OK thankyou, I’ll give it a shot!
Hi SolarLune,
Thanks a lot for X-emitter!
Have few questions. Tried to use xemitter for static particles (deactivated calculator and pulse on emitter + speed to zero).
was testing how many static particles is possible to use without lag. When I used 10000 (shadeless no alpha) the framerate droped down to 2.7fps. Tried some optimization you described in attached txt. Now wondering is that possible to optimize static particles even more? Was thinking would be possible to add to Xemmiter distance culling as well and use it to generate grass/trees/bushes etc?
Yeah, I think I tried to implement distance culling (LOD), but that’s for calculating the particles. You could implement that culling into each particle, but you’d have to calculate the particles. What exactly did you mean by ‘distance culling’?
That is weird! In my galaxy demo, I clearly have more than 10000 star. I try to display 5000. The trick was: 1. add a partparent property set to True, this way the particles get parented to the emitter. 2. split your particles with many emitters, lets say that each spawns 1000 objects. 3. add a property in each emitter to make them visible or invisible (culling). The rasterizer renders distant particles even if they are not visible. Use a little script to activate the visibility property if the camera is close enough. 4. When possible, group you particles, for example for grass join a small group of grass blades instead of using single or 4 blades. 5. Run the emit only once 6. remove unnecessary properties from the emitters. I think that will optimize your scene. For mine, I even turned off bullet and put all objects to no collision, I got full frames, I might be having 50000 particles.
SolarLune: I mean posibility to specify how far away from camera will particles start to disappear
Torakunsama: I thought to use only one object (ground) as the emitter and then to move visibility of the particles with the camera
here is my “bad” attempt. If you could send me some example that will be great!
Thanks
F
Hey Solarlune…
very great Particle System!! I am trying to get it set up for my game, but I have some strange issues. Maybe I miss something.
Here is how set it up.
I create an emitter and a particle.
The emitter is linked to the XEmitter.Emitter Module each tic.
I create my properties, as partobj and so on…
The strange thing is, that some of them work, and some not. For example… The particles get emitted… I can change the size… but partlife doesn’t work. They don’t die. Or partgrow doesn’t work either, but partsize does. Have I missed a step in setting up the particle system?
EDIT
I found my problem… I have forgotten to apply the script to the camera.
Once Again… Awesome ParticleSystem!!! This is really powerfull!!!
X-Emitter Version 1.10.1 has been released.
I was thinking i may use this for a muzzle flash + smoke from a RPG or something, it looks to be fun.
Yeah, it can do those - the muzzle flash you could do with an invisible plane parented to the gun, though. No reason to take up CPU adding something that can just be set to be invisible or not.