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I just uploaded a new version of the TimelineFX Alpha with a few new features and more bug fixes. Here’s the main highlights: Cylinders I added 2 new emission types for 3d effects. The first is cylinder, which is exactly as you’d expects – allows you to spawn particles in a cylinder shape. Also worth pointing out that making the cylinder have 0 height you also have a ring emission type. Icospheres Icosphere is similar to an ellipse but with the icosphere you can spawn in a grid with up to 5 subdivisions to give a unique effect. An icosphere Read more

For the last month and a half since the last blog post where I mentioned that I was strongly thinking about adding 3d particle effects to timelinefx – that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. It’s been a lot of fun mixed in with a lot of head scratching as I wrap my head around 3d math again (it’s been a while since I did any 3d stuff) but I’m mostly there with it. I still have a few things to iron out with it and would like to create an example library to go with the next alpha update but Read more

A lot of work has been done since the last update in March and most of it wasn’t directly related to the editor it was more with the TimelineFX library (available here on github). I really wanted a better solution for how effects are updated and drawn. The way that I was doing it was that you have a particle manager, and to this you add all effects, which then spawn all the particles and these are all updated by the particle manager. The problem with this is that all the particles are basically mashed together in the order that Read more

I just uploaded a new Alpha version with some more bug fixes plus a new importer to import effects from other effect libraries. This will only import effects from the current alpha version (not the old version eff files) but I may well add an importer for the old version as well at some point. The new importer should be a lot more useable then the old version. You can now drag effects and emitters individually or you can import all if you wish. Plus you can also drag over shapes individually as well if needed.   Full list of Read more

Just another round of bug fixing and streamlining, some of the highlights: Folders are back! One of the few remaining features from the old version that wasn’t in yet are folders, so it’s now a little bit easier to organise your effect libraries. Clicking and Dragging effects, emitters and folders. You can once again click and drags things in the library tab to re-order, move and copy emitters and effects about. Copy and paste groups of graphs Rather then have to copy graph data one by one you now also have the option to copy all Global/Property/Base/Variation or Overtime graphs Read more

Been over due a blog post as usual but lots of work has been going on in the background, mainly on my 2d sprite renderer that I’m using to render the editor and all the particles. Made a huge amount of progress with it and learnt a lot more about Vulkan and graphics coding in general. I think this will pay off as my ultimate goal is to have all the particles get updated in a compute shader. So last year was the last year that I was going to work on web sites (my main source of income). So Read more

A new alpha version is now available with more bug fixes and some new presets available for selecting colors and gradients and also I’ve overhauled the new effect/emitter option under the edit menu so that you can now select from a bunch of presets. I did list that I would add a feature where the number of particles spawned would scale based on the size of the area, but in the end I decided not to add this into the editor as it’s easy enough to do using the TimelineFX library and more of a feature that’s only useful when Read more