It’s always good to see how TimelineFX is being used to make particle effects in games all over the world. I spotted an article on Gamasutra about how Double 11 had created the particle effects in their PixelJunk Shooter Ultimate Game. It’s a great article and goes into a lot of detail about how they also created all of the various effects including dynamic flowing water.
Their use of TimelineFX went further than making use of the exported effects to sprite sheets, they went as far as to develop their own engine in c++ so they could use the effects more dynamically in-game –
Another aspect of our graphical overhaul included the creation of a new range of particle effects. Sometimes these replaced the original effects and other times they augmented them to give a greater sensory impact. Our new particle effects were authored in TimelineFX (http://www.rigzsoft.co.uk/) which is a great tool for authoring 2D or 2.5D effects. Although it allows the authoring of complex effects based on physics and parameter curves, the primary purpose is to bake these effects into an animated sprite for use at run time in the game. For Shooter Ultimate however I took a different approach, and wrote a realtime playback engine. This allows far greater flexibility because we can override parameters at run time to make the effects interactive (such as the emission angle, rate and speed), we can also rescale area emitters to cover designer specified areas, and we can produce particles in world space so for example, a booster trail can be left behind when the ship moves.
It’s a great game, I recommend you grab a copy on steam!
