Posts Tagged ‘special effects’

Firefly 3

I noticed I never wrote anything about Firefly, but if you’ve looked at my portfolio, you may have seen it under the Game Tool section. Firefly is simply a tool to create 2d particle systems, for special effects in 2d games. I’ve been working on cleaning up the UI and adding support for more advanced features and fx, and here’s a new screenshots of how things look.

firefly particle fx editor

A few major points of interest:

  • A nicer, custom, iconified tree view showing particles and emitters.
  • 2 views vs. the 3 views in previous versions. The untextured preview was dropped, as it was largely unnecessary.
  • A custom listbox control editable properties replacing the standard property grid control (the property grid look terrible unless it’s heavily customized and it’s also fairly difficult to work with)
  • Paths for particles exhibiting non-linear motion are now shown correctly (previously, only straight lines were shown). I was looking into rendering Bézier splines, but this is difficult to do using just the fixed-function pipeline and just rendering a set of line segments was much simpler and worked quite well.

The rendering is still done using Managed DirectX, which still works great, but, unfortunately, is not supported for 64-bit systems, so the app has to be compiled as a 32-bit application and run atop the WoW64 subsystem.