PhotonDust

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Photon Dust is the particle system made for Resonite that replaced the unity particle system. It is more modular and extensible than the original system.

Photon Dust is now in the main game, but still being tested. See the GitHub discussion thread for more information.

The implementation of this system is currently tracked as issue 587 on GitHub.

How to use it

Photon Dust's modularity allows for making all sorts of effects. How the system works is there is a life cycle system like other particles. Particles are "Born" from an emitter, "Live" or have lifetime, and "Die"

To start, an enviroment is needed. To make this simple, use a Dev Tool's create menu to create a Photon Dust or particle system.

This will create a Photon Dust system with a Particle emitter shooting particles like a portal. To modify this, the emitter can have its values adjusted, such as speed, rotation, and many other values for emitters. A list of alternative emitters that can be used are under the Rendering/Particles/Emitters in the attach Component menu. For any emitter added, they need the Photon Dust System specified in their system field, which will be the Component:ParticleSystem in the root of the Photon Dust object we made.

Photon Dust is made from a modules, which can be read about more in the Modular approach section. To make your Particles move with gravity, forces, and turbulence, simply add a module and insert the module into the Component:ParticleSystem that is Photon Dust. This will instantly make the module affect Particles in the specified system. Every module respects the disabled property, meaning disabling a module will disable it's effect on the Particles.

How it works

Photon Dust as a system has been commonly compared to being similar to Minecraft's robust Particle system. It is modular, fast, multithreaded, and allows for forces like Blender3D's and Minecraft's particles.

Multithreading

The Photon Dust system is multithreaded, meaning it will do calculations on separate CPU cores to distribute the load on the machine. This allows for a much greater number of particles running at once. This does however allow the system to utilize the entire CPU to simulate. So too many particles will pin the CPU to 100%. The system however will slow itself down if other processes by the game or other programs need CPU power. This causes the particles to become a slide show without ruining frame rate of the game or other games running.

Modular approach

Instead of condensing most of the options within a single monolithic component like before, most options are broken up in modules.

Several modules are already implemented, and more will be implemented in the future. Current ones include but not limited to:

• Ribbons - particles will have ribbons connecting them to each other.
• Trails - particles will have strips of color or patterns that follow behind them
• SimplexTurbulentForce - particles will move through the air as if hitting turbulent air
• RadialForce - Particles will be repelled or attracted to arbitrary points.
• GravityForce - particles can have gravity

And many more! A list of modules and their effects the game uses can be found under the component category Rendering/Particle System/Modules.

Differences from the legacy system

Photon Dust has several notable differences from the old legacy particle system that existed before. It is modular, fast, multithreaded, and doesn't fall to the same emit and forget systems of Unity. It also is a clean component, without a monolithicly large component from older days when Unity was the underlying simulator of such systems.

See Also

• Photon Dust Emitters
• Component:ParticleSystem
• Photon Dust Rendering Styles