For my final year project at Univeristy I'm looking at writing a middleware library or something similar which will generate particle effects with the minimum of fuss. A sort of particle engine kind of thing. I was wondering if anyone could recommend any good books which deals with particles? The reason I'm posting in this forum is because I'm going to be implementing my project in OpenGL so I'd prefer something that was OpenGL specific and preferably platform independent. Thanks, Darrell

I found this to be one of the best articles on particle systems. It's a Gamasutra article written by John van der Burg. I followed this to design and create my first particle system. It sounds just right as a guide to use for a project such as yours. The article focuses on the design, which is where I suggest you also spend the time. The actual coding differences between a DirectX particle system and an OpenGL one are minimal. The design of the particle system as a whole (particle managers, base particle system that is used to build each particle effect, and the emitter system etc), is so much more important than which graphics API is used to render it. In my particle system, only the base particle system class has any graphics API code in it.

hth
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