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
New Alpha, New Features – blend factor, playback speed and more!
It’s been a very busy few weeks working on 2 big new things for TimelineFX – a compute shader and a new motion randomness alorithm that uses Simplex Noise. Particle Compute Shader I really wanted to get this out of my system as I always wanted to see if I could make TimelineFX effects run in a compute shader for maximum speed and free up the CPU. This would be a big plus for anyone wanting to incorperate the TimelineFX library into their games and other projects. It took a lot of head scratching as to how I’d make 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
As mentioned in the previous update I had been doing a lot of work on my renderer that I’m using to render the particles and the editor. This month I finally got back onto the editor again and did a huge amount of work on stability and a few quality of life features. You can grab the latest version of the alpha here! As part of my bug hunting I recreated some of the old effects from the very first libray I created in the old version of the editor. You’ll find that library in the download as well. Some 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
I just uploaded Alpha number 5 which ticks off another feature I had planned for the alpha stage – the ability to setup graphs from a number of presets, including bell curves, s curves and simple linear slopes etc. In addition to that you can also generate a sine or square wave as well which is great for modulating attributes such as size and opacity but it can also be great to just experiment with all the other attributes as well, especially the overtime attributes. There is also a new option under the settings menu: Preview Trail Mode. Activating this 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
I have just uploaded Alpha release number 3, which as well as a bunch of bug fixes also includes a proper seamless texture preview which is a big improvement on the previous version: As mentioned there were also a bunch of bug fixes including some nasty crashes, slowly but surely it’s becoming more stable! For the next alpha I will start to include some new features not seen before in TimelineFX, so looking forward to implementing those. The idea will be to add some features (as outlined on this page) and then move the editor into a beta phase where Read more
I’ve just pushed the initial commit to github for the C++ library of timelinefx that you can use to implement the effects into your game or application directly. I’ve tried to make the API as simple as possible so hopefully there shouldn’t be any major issues implementing it. The library is render agnostic, so you will need to provide your own function to load the images for the particles and also a function to actually render the particles. See the Read me document for more information: https://github.com/peterigz/timelinefxlib and there’s also an example inside the examples folder. The library is still Read more
