Particle Basics

The WildPockets particle system is a work in progress. It is designed to be very powerful, but it is not entirely complete right now.

Particle systems are created by writing a tiny program in "ParticleScript." To those familiar with GPU shader languages, ParticleScript will look rather familiar. By providing a scripting language to control the behavior of individual particles, you gain the maximum flexibility and programmability. It would be too expensive to execute an interpreted script for each particle, so ParticleScript is designed as follows: the script is executed once per frame, not once per particle. Each command in the language implicitly affects all the particles, or a selected subset of the particles.

The following chapters describe the ParticleScript language and the Particle API. Please note that our Lua interpreter will not directly interpret your ParticleScript. Chapters 14A-14C will describe how to use ParticleScript, and Chapter 14D will explain how to integrate it into your Lua code.