It’s been one year since the first posts about my particle system: a demo in March and then an introduction in April. Last time I wrote about renderer updates and this was the last planned post for the series. I think most of requirements were achieved and I can be quite happy about the results.

Finally, I managed to finish the adventure with my particle system! This time I’d like to share some thoughts about improvements in the OpenGL renderer. Code was simplified and I got little performance improvement. The Series Initial Particle Demo Introduction Particle Container 1 - problems Particle Container 2 - implementation Generators & Emitters Updaters Renderer Introduction to Software Optimization Tools Optimizations Code Optimizations Renderer Optimizations Summary The most recent repo: particles/renderer_opt @github

It’s time to start improving the particle code and push more pixels to the screen! So far, the system is capable to animate and do some basic rendering with OpenGL. I’ve shown you even some nice pictures and movies… but how many particles can it hold? What is the performance?

As I wrote in the Introduction to the particle series, I’ve got only a simple particle renderer. It uses position and color data with one attached texture. In this article you will find the renderer description and what problems we have with our current implementation. The Series Initial Particle Demo Introduction Particle Container 1 - problems Particle Container 2 - implementation Generators & Emitters Updaters Renderer (this post) Introduction to Optimization Tools Optimizations Code Optimizations Renderer Optimizations Summary Introduction The gist is located here: fenbf / ParticleRenderer

In our particle system we have already a basic foundation: the container and the framework. Now we need some modules that can actually wake particles. In this post I will describe the emitter module and generators. The Series Initial Particle Demo Introduction Particle Container 1 - problems Particle Container 2 - implementation Generators & Emitters (this post) Updaters Renderer Introduction to Optimization Tools Optimizations Code Optimizations Renderer Optimizations Summary Introduction Basic design:

After watching some of the talks from Build 2014 - especially “Modern C++: What You Need to Know” and some talks from Eric Brumer I started thinking about writing my own test case. Basically I’ve created simple code that compares vector<Obj> vs vector<shared_ptr<Obj>> The first results are quite interesting so I thought it is worth to describe this on the blog.

One of the most crucial part of a particle system is the container for all particles. It has to hold all the data that describe particles, it should be easy to extend and fast enough. In this post I will write about choices, problems and possible solutions for such container.

Particle systems are awesome! Not only can you create amazing effects, but you can also optimize code and push even more and more pixels to the screen. This post series will cover how to design a flexible particle system and apply a bunch of optimizations to run it faster. Flexible means that it can be used in real applications and for a variety of graphics effects.

For some time I have been playing around with my particle system. It seems to be a very interesting experiment to do! Today I just want to present some of current results and thoughts on future development. So far I managed to create three different effects: star tunnel: just round position generator + position update attractors: four attractors that affect acceleration of each particle fountain: simple collision detection with a floor Let us see some of the results…