good program to prototype particle effect?

Gordon

I am looking to try and revamp some of my particle effects and was wondering what tools free or otherwise, I can use to view them before I get them into the game? I am starting on the imp fireball and even tho right now it's using the PT_Point I can try to make it look good for texturing of the particles down the line.

deus-ex

To my knowledge there aren't any available. The Doomsday Engine Definition syntax is unique and specific to Doomsday I suppose. The likelihood that any third party application supports it tends towards zero, I'm afraid.

I was hoping for a live edit feature to be implemented into Doomsday, where one can edit and execute a definition during a running game. Ideally Doomsday would offer a interface (that doesn't need to be as fancy as the launcher UI), where one could select generator functions and manipulate their parameters on the fly, perhaps with sliders, radio boxes, check boxes, input fields, you name it. That would make understanding and editing definitions much more easy and efficient.

Gordon

I knew when I asked this that there would be none for this engine but I can work out how to reproduce what I get from the program into dday. it's hard prototyping when you need to close down the program every time you make a small change.

skyjake

At this time, the best way to approach this is to have your generator definition open in one window and Doomsday open on the side in another. After you make edits to your definition file, you need to enter the "reset" console command that makes Doomsday reload all the definitions and data files.

I haven't tried doing this recently so I can't vouch that it works as intended at the moment, i.e., there may have been regressions. I'll make a note of testing this before stable 2.1.

Gordon

i tried this but dday now also read the date/time the file was created thus if you make a new save over the existing one it will crash dday.

skyjake

Well that needs to be fixed.