G''day!

There''s a very simple (not very feature-laden) particle system demo with source at:
http://www.drunkenhyena.com/docs/d3d_tutorial.phtml#Lesson9

But it''s very simplistic. Doing a Google search for particle system tutorial will probably show quite a few results.

A) Your particle system is typically done almost entirely on the CPU, but the calculations do not have to be intense in most cases. You can do some cool tricks with vertex shaders to off load some of this onto the graphic card, but then you''re targetting high-end hardware.

B)Again, it depends on your particle system. If it''s a simple system, with few particles and simple collision interaction, then no it won''t be. However if you have 100,000 particles being driven by a realistic physics engine, then yeah.

C)Most often, yeah. It''s cheap and easy to do and usually gives good enough results. I have seen them implemented with simple meshes, but that''s pretty rare.


Stay Casual,

Ken
Drunken Hyena

1) IT depends on how many particles (since your keeping vectors for each particle in the system)
2) Depends on how your world structures are used.
3) Yes basicly. And in directx 8.0+ you can use the pointsprites to speed up and simpily billboarding.

Point sprites are slower then regular matrix billboarding, from my experience.

Z.

quote:Original post by Zaei
Point sprites are slower then regular matrix billboarding, from my experience.

Z.

Really? Thats rather interesting. Is that with hardware support (GF3, Radeon 8500)?


Moe''s site

Im running on a Rage Pro. I wouldnt have a clue =). It probably is faster with hardware support though, since the billboarding is taking place in hardware, instead of software (and, likely, only one vertex is being transformed per particle, instead of the 6 I use, to save on DrawPrimitive calls). I actually tried doing a snow system in point sprites, with 1000 particles, and ended up with ~3 fps.

Z.