Particle Designer
Particle Designer is an OSX application that allows you to graphically design stunning particle effects. Particles are commonly used within games allowing the developer to create amazing organic effects such as smoke, fire, stars, portals etc. These particle effects can consist of a large number of finely tuned parameters that generate the effect you’re after. Many particle systems require you to write this configuration by hand while Particle Designer allows these configurations to be generated automatically.
Particle Designer currently supports two particle engines. The first is the particle system created by us as part of our game programming tutorials. This particle system is used within Sir Lamorak’s Quest: The Spell Of Release and is detailed in the “Learning iPhone Game Programming” book written by Mike Daley. The book is due for release summer 2010 and will be published by Addison-Wesley. It is also currently available through Safari Rough Cuts.
23 Comments
mxclouti on October 1st, 2010
Nice app! Nice book!
itim on November 10th, 2010
Great looking application, just as neat as your tutorials (really loved them). Now, there’s something I’ve been trying to figure out for a while – how did you make all those slider-text-stepper controls – writing interface plugin, binding and copying, using custom views? Since this is a commercial app, I don’t really expect you to answer this, or even to give me any pointers, but I just had to ask :)
philippe972 on February 26th, 2011
Nice program,
It would be very nice to have a windows/linux version…
By the way thanks for your tutorials
NikolaTesla on March 25th, 2011
This is such an amazing app. Thank you for creating such a great tool. Its great being able to fine tune and create particles, seeing the change real time. Plus its easy to integrate back into Cocos2d after you get things how you want them.
swee5420 on April 16th, 2011
Bought it and like it so much.
wischj on June 28th, 2011
love this app! really nice work. having trouble registering though. installed the app and now trying to drag the license file onto the icon in the dock and it doesn’t work. tried dropping the *.gz file on, and the file that extracts out of the *.gz file. neither seem to do anything. getting frustrated help? is there a better way to contact you?!
mike on June 28th, 2011
Hi wischj, you can contact me at mike@71squared.com if you need more help.
One thing to make sure is that the extracted file has a file extension of .particledesigner_license
Hope that helps
Mike
wischj on June 28th, 2011
awesome! worked! thanks for letting me know that and for the quick response, not sure why the extension was hidden when i extracted from .gz file. glad i was able to register particle designer!
dchs on July 19th, 2011
Very nice program, I’ve used to create different awesome effects. But only one question, I’ve created an effect using the simulator provided by your software, exported in cocos2d and is not rendered equally… what could I have to check?
mike on July 19th, 2011
Thanks for the feedback dchs. It’s worth checking to make sure that the blending mode is being set correctly. Blending modes can have a big impact on how your particles look.
If that is not the case let me know with some more details and I’ll take a look.
Mike
J-Crew on August 1st, 2011
I just bought Particle Designer but am unsure how to implement it in my project. I bought your book as well and would like to utilize the options that the designer adds. The book said I’d be able to swap out code that came with the download but no code was included.
mike on August 1st, 2011
Hi J-Crew
Sorry about that, the demo download link seems to have got lost along the way.
Visit http://particledesigner.71squa.....erDemo.zip
This contains an Xcode project that has the minimum necessary to get the 71Squared ParticleEmitter up and running. If you take the ParticleEmitter.h and .m files and drop them into your project, you should be able to then make use of the PEX file output from Particle Designer.
Let me know if you have any problems :o)
Mike
J-Crew on August 1st, 2011
Thanks for the project Mike. I replaced the old Particle Emitter class with the one in that project and I’m getting a SIGABRT message at line 392:
emitterType = [aConfig intValueFromChildElementNamed:@"emitterType" parentElement:rootXMLElement];
I used Particle Designer to make a .pex but when I implemented it all it aborts. Before I put any particle things in my game everything was working fine. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
J-Crew on August 3rd, 2011
I ended up finding a solution to the problem Mike. Thank you so much for offering to help though! It seems that it was simply an XCode quirk. I fixed it by instead of copying the original classes themselves, I copied the text out of them and pasted it into classes of my own that I named the same as yours. Strange but I’m glad I got it working.
If I could ask you though, how would I go about firing an emitter on command if the duration is not equal to -1?
Again I truly appreciate your continued support and you really have made such outstanding software! Thank you!
Alex on August 19th, 2011
Bought it. Use it all the time for my cocos2D projects. But buggy. Reproducible as follows:
1. if no Internet connection at time of launch, hangs for a while. See console messages: “…Connection failed! Error – This computer’s Internet connection appears to be offline. http://www.71squared.com/pexfiles/code/sync.php”
2. incompatible with abandonware Painter’s Picker. console says: “Error loading ~/Library/ColorPickers/paintersPicker.colorPicker/Contents/MacOS/paintersPicker: dlopen(/Users/alexr/Library/ColorPickers/paintersPicker.colorPicker/Contents/MacOS/paintersPicker, 265): no suitable image found. … no matching architecture in universal wrapper”. No apparent hangs though, so not sure it’s a problem. Changed PD settings to launch in 32-bit mode, hence removing the warning but performance may take a hit, no?
3. following #1, I fored quit the app a couple of times but Activity Monitor them as still around, but unkillable. A kill -9 won’t work. Had to reboot my MBP.
Hope you can fix this soon. Nice app otherwise. Like it a lot.
Alex
Joey on August 22nd, 2011
How to enable support for retina and iPad? Do I just use a bigger texture inside particle designer?
Cosmic on November 2nd, 2011
Hi :) I downloaded and paid for your particle emiiter a week ago, I have played with it a lot but I cant get it to implement into my project..
I read ” If you take the ParticleEmitter.h and .m files and drop them into your project, you should be able to then make use of the PEX file output from Particle Designer.” From the comments above and I did it, but I got a lot of errors. I Cant get it to work at all. Mike can you help me out? I hope this is still active. I tend to use a lot of the emitters in my upcoming game :D
dhmspector on November 14th, 2011
Does particle designer support the new CAEmitterCell feature of iOS5..?
stravingo on November 17th, 2011
Congratulation, this is a really useful app that saves me a lot of time to fine tune my particles effects. Really happy to buy it :)
However, is there a way to have a real size window in iPad mode (768×1024 pixels) ? A nice addition would also to be able to load a picture as a background to better test and position the particles system.
J-Crew on December 31st, 2011
Michael,
I’ve recently added your newest code for particle designer into my game and it seems to be lacking the ability to manage transparencies. I copied and pasted the classes as instructed.
– Thank you
mikelancastertech@gmail.com on April 16th, 2012
doesn’t work on my mac mini running OS Lion
the emitter never shows anything in the iPhone simulation
mxclouti on October 1st, 2010
I think I found a bug in your Particle Designer.
I loaded a particle from the shared particles (Radial Type).
I changed the Max Radius to something else and then saved the particle. I loaded the particle back and I still have the old Max Radius.
Thanks.