Would it be possible to add support for 'restarting\resetting' particle systems?

I often maintain a pool of previously created particle systems that have finished so that I can then restart them in a new location once a new one is required. This saves doing the memory allocations\setup and creation code many times each time a particle system is started.

By the way I really like what you've done and if and it was really easy for me to get an OpenGL ES renderer going for my iPhone project.

Cheers

-Craig

Hi,

first of all, glad to see you like the library and you built renderers for the iphone

Pooling particle systems is the right way to do. I was thinking of a way to reset a particle system but it appears not that easy to do in an automatic manner as every parameters would have to be doubled to keep its original state. Im still thinking about it though.

Resetting systems in a manual way is easy to do and as you know exactly what has changed you can reset it by hand. The way I see to do it is keeping a base system that was used to build up all systems in the pool. When you need to reactivate a system, you just reset the parameters of the system you need from the values of the parameters of the base system. Most of the time it will be emptying the groups of the system and resetting the tank of the emitters.

I managed to get them resetting properly but I had to make the member variable 'fraction' of emitter to public so I could reset it.

Heres my current implementation:

void ParticleSystem::start(void) {
Emitter *emitter;
int i;

// Set alive flag
m_isAlive = true;

// Empty the particle system
m_sparkParticleSystem->empty();

// Set the emitters tank values back to their initial values
for (i=0; i<m_emitters.size(); ++i) {
emitter = &m_emitters[i];
emitter->m_sparkEmitter->setTank(emitter->m_initialTank);

emitter->m_sparkEmitter->fraction = Rand::getFloat(1.0f);

}
}

The red bit is the only bit I had to hack in. If you could please add some method to reset this or something then that'll be great and I can remove my hacks

The fraction parameter is only here to keep track of the current state of emission. It is basically the fractional part of the next particle to be emitted, when it reaches 1, a new particle is emitted. That s to keep the emission rate consistent.

You really dont have to care about it. It is set to a random value between 0 and 1 to introduce a phase shift in the emission so that for example an emitter emitting particle at a rate of 1 particle every 10 seconds will emit its first particle at a time between 0 and 10 sec.

It will always be between 0 and 1, resetting is not necessary.