Comments

Comments by Steve

My original project idea was to create a particle system, allowing a user to generate impressive results by way of flexible inputs and methods for dynamic changing. There were a few (many) problems with this:

• Real-time randomization of particles had extreme effects on framerates.
• What would each particle be rendered as?
• Could all values be edited in real-time without restarting emitter?
• And so on...

The choice to go to a graphical effect package was based upon the fact that variables would all be set prior to drawing the system, and only a select few could be edited on the fly. I also felt that the emitter would have little practical use, while an effects package could be utilized and even be used as a learning tool for new OpenGL programmers.

The effects package, in my opinion, was actually more difficult to program than the particle system emitter. This was due to amount of research into physics and effect patterns which was rather time-consuming. I feel that the results were pretty impressive, though. In real-life, physics equations are computed in real-time. This is not always the case in computing applications. The algorithms we created were fairly accurate, real-time, and turned out very nice. And this was the goal we set.