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Been over due a blog post as usual but lots of work has been going on in the background, mainly on my 2d sprite renderer that I’m using to render the editor and all the particles. Made a huge amount of progress with it and learnt a lot more about Vulkan and graphics coding in general. I think this will pay off as my ultimate goal is to have all the particles get updated in a compute shader. So last year was the last year that I was going to work on web sites (my main source of income). So Read more

A new alpha version is now available with more bug fixes and some new presets available for selecting colors and gradients and also I’ve overhauled the new effect/emitter option under the edit menu so that you can now select from a bunch of presets. I did list that I would add a feature where the number of particles spawned would scale based on the size of the area, but in the end I decided not to add this into the editor as it’s easy enough to do using the TimelineFX library and more of a feature that’s only useful when Read more

I have just uploaded Alpha release number 3, which as well as a bunch of bug fixes also includes a proper seamless texture preview which is a big improvement on the previous version: As mentioned there were also a bunch of bug fixes including some nasty crashes, slowly but surely it’s becoming more stable! For the next alpha I will start to include some new features not seen before in TimelineFX, so looking forward to implementing those. The idea will be to add some features (as outlined on this page) and then move the editor into a beta phase where Read more

Just a quick update on what’s been happening since the last post. I’m pretty much almost there for an initial Alpha release, I think I was calling it a beta before but Alpha probably makes more sense. Since the last post I have implemented the following: Particle drawing now utilises compute shaders. There’s still some things that I’d like to expand on but it’s a lot faster then it was. Now the particle positions/scale/rotation are udpated on the CPU into a staging buffer which is uploaded to the GPU. The GPU then uses that buffer to update a vertex buffer Read more

I recently reached a new milestone in the new version of the editor and finished adding the ability to export effects to a spritesheet/individual images. This means that I’m not very far away now from having feature parity with the current version of TimelineFX. After that I’m looking forward to adding a bunch of new features going forward, but there is still some work to do before then. The next things I want to get done before making a beta version available are (initial beta version will be windows only) Optimising the drawing of the particles utilising compute shaders. I’ve Read more

So in the last update back in January 2019 I’d made the decision to redevelop TimelineFX in C++ from scratch and that’s basically what I’ve been doing for the last 18 months. That meant that I had to learn C++ as I’d never coded in it before and I’m happy to say that I’ve actually enjoyed it. Of course it hasn’t all been smooth sailing and Visual Studio has its quirks but overal it’s been fairly straightforward, more so then I expected. I spent the first few months learning the basics following Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig and Barbara E. Read more

I have just uploaded a new update of TimelineFX! This feels good as I’ve had trouble actually getting it to build at all. This is because the language that I wrote TimelineFX in (Blitzmax) is no longer supported and various things changed in the wxWidget bindings that meant it no longer built. However, thanks to a guy called Brucey who writes a ton of bindings for Blitzmax (including wxWidgets), his version of Blitzmax called Blitzmax-NG is keeping things alive. So after a bit of tinkering TimelineFX is compiling again (it wasn’t as much work as i thought it was going Read more