Particle Universe V1.5.1

[drwbns]

So it looks like I bought it at 1.4 but I have no idea what may shareit id was. I think you were offering it at $20 back then. I tried to do the forgot password thing, but it says an error occured. Maybe I didn't create a user name? I also tried searching my emails with nothing about a digital river acct...

[spookyboo]

Please pm me

[Tiffer]

Hey, PU is a great tool, I cannot recommend it enough, I'm very happy with my purchase. The fact that PU exists is by far the best thing about Ogre.

Have a question though, how do you guys deal with pre-loading resources? I use PU for temporary effects, things like explosions that just occur once and then I have to delete them, cause there may be several explosions at the same time at any given time.

My understanding is that a way to avoid slow-downs in the middle of the game when a certain explosion is used for the first time would be to put all the templates that I'm gonna use in an array, cycle through them at the start of the game, create a temporary particle system for them and call prepare(). This would in theory preload all the materials needed and parse the scripts, right?

The thing is, will those resources stay loaded, or will they be cleaned up if I destroy their particle systems? If they can be cleaned up, how do I ensure they aren't?

By the way, some unrelated feedback about an unimportant problem. I use an inverted windows theme where the background color is black and I can't read the text in the script editor of the PU editor because the colors are hardcoded. You should use system colors instead of hard coded colors, or at least make the colors customizable. Well, an easier solution would just be to also hardcode the background white

[jsding]

How can I change the default render group of ParticleUniverse? I want to render PU particles on top of MyGUI. Is that possible?

Thanks for your help.

[radman]

Trying to contact spookyboo, have tried other channels and gotten no response. Spookyboo: please PM me (we purchased PU).

[Herb]

It seems spookyboo has fallen off a cliff or something... His forum is full of spam and I sent him a PM on his forum in January and it's still not read... So, radman, you're not alone with not being able to get a hold of him.

A bit late jsding, but if you're still looking for that code snippet, here's how you change the render group of a PU particle. I had to adjust mine as it wouldn't render right with my terrain and paged geometry.

Code: Select all

    // create the particle
    ParticleUniverse::ParticleSystem* pSys = pMgr->createParticleSystem(temp, templateName, mSceneMgr);  
    
    // set the render group to later rendering to make sure terrain and paged geometry is already blitted 
    pSys->setRenderQueueGroup(Ogre::RENDER_QUEUE_WORLD_GEOMETRY_2);

You'll have to figure out that render queue you want to use. Look up the enum in the Ogre source for a listing.

[spookyboo]

I 'm still alive, although my forum is a mess
I am not very active at the moment (other important things to do), but I still look into the forum.

[ScreenOfDeath]

Hey Spookyboo,

I´ve sent you for a while a pm with a question about the status of Particle Universe and its annyoing bugs. (On your old forum, I even created a thread for it)
(And the quickfix to load the first effect - and a question about the scenenode/billboard rotation bug...)
But there was no reply from you.

Since you have no forum (which was very bloated by spam) I guess this is the right forum to ask my questions.
The last time I contacted you, you said you had much to do and no time for PU. (It was june 2012 .... or something like that)
I hope you have more time to improve it now, or maybe patch only the exe with a default enabled VSYNC option.
My laptop and every pc would love it, since the gpu doesnt have to calc at max power level. Its very nice to see that I have ~ 300 fps, but its annoying to must wear an earprotection.
You know? The fan and the temperature are at max level after a few seconds.

I hope you changed your mind about the source of the PU - the community and everyone else would like to see it.
Of course, not for free
Maybe you want to sell the source code of your editor - just send a pm to me. (Only for private use - for bug hunting, and for my going to free to play project)

Its sad to hear that you didnt changed anything in your great editor.
This is the only editor which is actually smart and (almost) well designed, popcornFx is also cool but it doesnt get updates too.

But the most important thing is the vsync option - please add this (its only a bool value to change, or a string to the params)
I really appreciate it.

Like this from the tikiwiki: http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/tiki-ind ... Parameters
(Old page but maybe you are using it this way)
NameValuePairList misc;
misc["vsync"] = "1";
createRenderWindow("My render window", 800, 600, false, &misc);

(I´ve bought it in 2012)

I hope you have great news

[spookyboo]

This has (besides time constraints) another reason: There is not much room for improvements, other than bug fixes. PU needs a complete redesign to take it a step further. This means multi threading support, batching, decoupling from Ogre (other than rendering) to make it available for other renderers (for example Abobe After Effects) etc. I made a start on this some months ago, but because of personal issues I did not have the time to continue. My plans for PU are:
Make the plugin source free (MIT license). I wil still host it on my site but I won't actively develop anymore on this version (other that keeping it up to date with the latest Ogre version). I will not integrate bugfixes from other people (because that also takes a lot of time). Maybe someone else wants to do this. I am more than happy to host the latest version.
Include the editor source in the package. I will still sell it for it's current price. This means you only pay for the editor source.
On the background I continue with a complete new version of PU. It will be modular and not only for Ogre.

nB. I will not to this right now. Just watch this thread (and be patient please)

[ScreenOfDeath]

Hi,

yay! Thats are great news to anybody!
Thank you for this nice turn

Here is maybe an important step:
You should use your own typedefs descriptions when you are using Ogre:: typedefs, because intellisense in VS 2012 wont work due to the duplicated data.
Its definatly only the PUs header which broke the intellisense - if I remove them, everything work as aspected. (But there are no compiler error or Intellisense errors...)

I really enjoy your PU

Thank you!

I hope your new particle editor would have native Ogre support, that would be awesome!