Party is a modern, 3d particle system for GameMaker. It's simple to use, scalable, extensible, and offers high performance by leveraging the GPU. It can hook itself onto GameMaker's standard particle system, emulating it on the GPU while also providing the user with superpowers.
Party is currently experimental. Feel free to report issues and submit PRs.
- High performance - process and render millions of particles in parallel
- Stateful, non-parametric system - each particle is a separate discrete entity
- Plug-n-play - can override or run on top of the standard GM CPU particle system
Party provides nearly everything the standard GM particle system does while improving it in a couple of ways:
- Additional dimension
- Additional color and alpha tween components
- Additional emission shapes and settings
- Additional randomization fields including delta and wiggle for each particle component
- Stateful fields such as gravity, sprite_index, etc. which are stateless in standard GM
- Deterministic emission states - allowing you to repeat/loop emission patterns
- Particle components - solve complex, emerging behavior of individual particle types
- Effectors - attractors, destructors, painters, colliders, custom processors
- Collider shapes - spheres, boxes, cylinders, sprites, models
- Additional particle flags and common built-in behavior
- VRAM management - Party solvers can automatically rescale and rearrange their memory buffers
- State snapshots
- Physics
Party currently does not support:
- part_type_step
- part_type_death
- GameMaker version 2023 up to 2023.800 BETA
- Target platform needs to support:
- surface_rgba32float surface format
- Texture lookups for vertex shaders
- GMD3D11.dll is included, enabling VTF on Windows
- Behavior of GPU particles deviates from their standard CPU counterparts in some areas
- Distribution can be wrong depending on device/platform
- Missing clear() methods for GMPartyType and GMPartyWrapper
- Shader uniforms should be cached for performance
- Particle component processing sequence is not guaranteed
- In 3d, view matrix needs to be reapplied after GMPartySolver calls
- Snapshots are currently bugged, making fbos volatile on device driver context updates (going full-screen and such)