All posts in Libraries

New alpha version released powered by a new renderer! So last blog post I mentioned that I wanted to refactor the renderer I use and also write a memory allocator and both those things are now done! It was a lot of work the last 3 months but I’m really pleased with the way things are going.   Zest Pocket Render So I did a complete rewrite of the renderer (based on the previous one) and also re-wrote it in c which I really enjoy using. Zest is a very minimal but flexible renderer which currently focuses on rendering sprites Read more

Just uploaded a new Alpha version of the editor, which doesn’t have too many new features but does have a huge amount of new stuff going on under the hood. Fully implemented SIMD for updating particles I’ve spent a long time thinking about how I would go about doing this ever since taking on the rewrite of TimelineFX from the beginning. Being relatively new to C/C++ and SIMD in general, it has been a step-by-step process to get to this point. In the last blog post I made, I talked about how I made things multithreaded, and now I’ve added Read more

A long overdue post, but rest assured, lots of work has been done over the last couple of months! Optimizations of the TimelineFX Library Firstly, for most of December, I did a big refactor of the TimelineFX Library, not just to optimize it but also to open the door for a lot more optimizations in the future. This had two main steps: I transitioned all the data for updating effects, emitters, and particles to “structs of arrays”. Without going into too much technical detail, this makes it a lot easier to parallelize updating the particles. The problem with storing all Read more

It’s been a very busy few weeks working on 2 big new things for TimelineFX – a compute shader and a new motion randomness alorithm that uses Simplex Noise.   Particle Compute Shader I really wanted to get this out of my system as I always wanted to see if I could make TimelineFX effects run in a compute shader for maximum speed and free up the CPU. This would be a big plus for anyone wanting to incorperate the TimelineFX library into their games and other projects. It took a lot of head scratching as to how I’d make Read more

As mentioned in the previous update I had been doing a lot of work on my renderer that I’m using to render the particles and the editor. This month I finally got back onto the editor again and did a huge amount of work on stability and a few quality of life features. You can grab the latest version of the alpha here! As part of my bug hunting I recreated some of the old effects from the very first libray I created in the old version of the editor. You’ll find that library in the download as well. Some Read more

I’ve just pushed the initial commit to github for the C++ library of timelinefx that you can use to implement the effects into your game or application directly. I’ve tried to make the API as simple as possible so hopefully there shouldn’t be any major issues implementing it. The library is render agnostic, so you will need to provide your own function to load the images for the particles and also a function to actually render the particles. See the Read me document for more information: https://github.com/peterigz/timelinefxlib and there’s also an example inside the examples folder. The library is still Read more