Announcing ParticleEmitterJS

[kinoro]

Hello everyone,

Pardon my intrusion, i would simply like announce my new javascript library for creating particle effects, along with the free editor. ParticleEmitterJS is a free extension for the CreateJS suite of JavaScript libraries, allowing developers to quickly add visually spectacular particle effects to their projects. It has been heavy influenced by other particle emitter implementations available in other frameworks, particularly Cocos2d.

In addition, we have created an editor which will give you the power to easy configure your own particle emitter and export the necessary code for use in your own work.

Go to http://purplemonkeystudios.org for more info, and let me know what you think!

[rich]

Nice work! I especially like the editor you made.

 

I do get some strange results when using the particle size though (so they scale in size over time). For example often it will emit solid rectangle shapes and also often renders a single big massive particle in the top left of the display. You can see both in this grab:

 

[kinoro]

Ah fantastic, glad you like it rich.

With regards to the issues you are experiencing... The huge circle occurs when one of the properties are not filled in. I'm planning on adding some better error trapping to handle this. With regards to the rectangles, that's slightly more perplexing. But thanks for reporting it, I shall look into that further.

[Chris]

I love the emitter and especially the editor. I created some decent looking smoke with it

 

A few ideas for features you might want to add:

• Image particles
• Different particle shapes
• Setting up a vector path for the particles to follow
• Using a shape as emitter. (currently you have a fixed point)

Is the emitter limited to usage with createJS?

[rich]

Yeah I would do your best to uncouple it from createJS if you want wider adoption of this. It shouldn't be too hard to let the dev implement their own renderer to be honest.

[kinoro]

@paratron

Thank you for highlighting the need to use images with the emitter - this is actually existing functionality, I simply haven't mentioned it in my blog. I will update the blog later to reflect this. By default the emitter will you simple circle particles, unless an image is supplied in the constructor, in which the emitter will use that instead.

I like the idea of vector paths and this is something I will look into. Thanks for that. With regards to the shape for the emitter, it's an interesting idea. The emitter currently supports an x and y position variance which may go some way to delivering what you suggest.

All in all, thanks very much for your feedback.

@rich

It was a conscious decision of mine to couple this with createjs as I see this framework as the up and coming serious contender for making games in html5 (And at the very least, it is the one im currently using fr the game we are currently writing). As such, I wanted to give the community an emitter implementation that would fit straight in without any hassle. However, I see your point, and given that paratron has also enquired about this, I will put some serious thought into decoupling it from createjs.

Thanks so far, and keep the feedback rolling in, it's very encouraging for me!

[Ezelia]

very nice

as rich suggested, I also think that uncoupling the emitter from createjs will make it easier to use for non createjs games.

 

maybe you can write a generic JS eitter with an abstracted interface that can be adapter to external engines.

 

this way you can distribute the default version with the core JS emitter and createJS interface, and let the community contribute with their own interfaces for other engines.

[kinoro]

Cheers ezelia. I like your abstracted interface idea.

As Html5 devs what would be your choice of engine for writing a game? Whilst I completely accept that decoupling the emitter would be of benefit, I thought CreateJS was a popular engine.

[rich]

I know more devs who don't use CreateJS than those who do

 

I think you'll find that lots of them use their own custom-built libs, so having the renderer abstracted out would benefit everyone really.

[kinoro]

Well that's food for thought. Thank you rich. Anyone else had a play yet?

[Aduros]

The ability to export from the editor to a .pex (format used by ParticleDesigner and other tools) would be cool.

[hyzhak]

 

 

Well that's food for thought. Thank you rich. Anyone else had a play yet?

I also interested in abstraction realization of particle system, because have plans to add plugin for my game engine https://github.com/darlingjs/darlingjs that decouple from any renderer engines. By the way it's cool to share your source from github, it's good way to get usefull pull requests from users.