For some time I have been playing around with my particle system. It seems to be a very interesting experiment to do! Today I just want to present some of current results and thoughts on future development.

So far I managed to create three different effects:

star tunnel: just round position generator + position update

attractors: four attractors that affect acceleration of each particle

fountain: simple collision detection with a floor

Let us see some of the results...

The Series

Screens

Movie

Plans

Create more effects! This will make my system more reusable. I often see particle tutorials that are very simple and cannot be easily extended. My idea is to have decent amount of flexibility.

Optimize!

I have rough numbers about the system: 250k particles (in the attractor effect) take around 13ms to calculate (on CPU). Fps drops to 30fps.



It would be nice to create a million particle system and run it at 30fps at least. I target CPU, not GPU currently

Test several methods of drawing and updating GPU buffers.

I do not want to set any deadlines by now. Hopefully there will be some more interesting posts about this experiments in near future :)