Update - some features added

I’ve added a few features that I was thinking about getting in, and implemented a change that was requested. Hopefully this works out for people!

1. Custom particle sprites. There’s now an option to use your own sprites for particles images: go to Data > Graphics > Particles to load them into the editor (if the sprite has multiple frames of animation you’ll need to specify this), and then you can assign them to particles.

2. Probabilistic emission rates have been changed. In GameMaker, a negative particle emission “rate” means the emitter has a probability of spawning a particle every step, so a “rate” of -10 means there is a 1 / 10 chance of a particle being spawned every time the emitter is updated. This was how the program originally worked, but it’s not intuitive and doesn’t make very much sense. Now a rate of less than 1 particle per update (ie, 60) will cause this instead. The generated code will still use the “correct” value, at least according to GameMaker.

3. Particles can no longer spawn themselves, directly or indirectly. This will eventually lead to the program crashing, and there’s no real point to doing it anyway.

4. Save and load particle and emitter settings to a single file. The files themselves aren’t something you’re probably going to be reading, but you can use them to save the state of your particle lab between sessions.

5. A few default particle demos. They’re more or less based on the demos shown in the trailer video. They’re also totally not just prefabricated states made using the aforementioned save and load system. (If you want to switch out the demos, look in the data/particles folder. I will not offer support for issues that arise from messing with these files.)

I could also provide a few scripts for reading the binary particle files (*.dddp) in your game, or at least the spec for them. This would be pretty redundant though, since the whole point of Particle Lab is to generate code to do it for you. Does anyone want this?

Other than that, I’m probably officially finished with this, although if people report bugs I’ll probably get around to fixing them. Going forward I want to make a few other tools, in particular a 3D version of this.