Particle Effects Editor

I originally created this editor during the development of AMPS - A Musical Platforming Symphony and it was used to design all of the particle effects in that game.

Features

• PFX editor with full GUI controls and live preview
• Lots of options including particle size, rotation, color, speed, emitter shape, emission angle, shrink over time, multiple textures etc.
• Randomize the effect for inspiration / accidental discoveries / fun
• Saves to proprietary text-based .pafx file format (human-readable, easy to parse)
• Includes example C++ code for parsing .pafx files and emitting, updating and rendering particles. Also includes gravity wells and a function pointer to be called on particle death (can spawn particles from particles!)
• Full documentation for editor and example code

I'd like to come back to this editor at some point and add all sorts of features as well as give full C++ rendering implementations for OpenGL and DirectX. You can read more about where this project came from here.

Examples

The program comes with 8 example effects. The first 3 demonstrate specific features:

• rocket - A very basic point emitter for a rocket trail
• plus_minus - Shows how effects can have multiple textures
  
• smooth - Textures can be used to make non-rectangular particles

The other 5 are effects we shipped with AMPS:

• collectable - Lazily drifting musical notes
• laser_beam - A crackling energy beam
• laser_collision - What happens when a beam hits a wall
  
• player_die - The player disintegrating upon death
• player_respawn - A reversal of the disintegration effect

License

This program and the example code are provided under the zlib license, which basically means you can do whatever you want with it and I can't be held liable. Any effects you create belong entirely to you. Attribution is not necessary, but I'd love to hear from you if you use this for anything!