Scaleable particle emitters and stuff

Continuing the discussion from Open Call for Video Tutorial Suggestions!:

It seems like there are so many possibilities… Just in making a new topic here, I saw the OpenGL ES Particle System Tutorial… i’ll have to have a look at that… i’d really like to see that in METAL… is there one on the site? (that would be a good suggestion… more metal tutorials…)

anyway, I feel like I don’t have suburb control over my particle system… for example, I’m not even sure how to get it to appear on top of a UI Button (instead of behind it…) I cannot seem to figure out the simple task of placing the UIView with the button behind the particles in the storyboard editor :-/ that should be so easy… yet if i just just swap views around everything seems to get all messed up… if i create them in a weird order, that also seems not to work well. not sure why i’m having trouble with what seems like such a simple task…

I can imagine wanting snow to fall only through the panes of glass on a window on a wall in a room, or just in a TV in a room… it would be interesting to be able to accomplish that in a scene kit game, where the user can move around in a 3d room, and have snow falling outside… not quite certain how to pull that off…

1 Like

Hi,

Sorry for the late answer, didn’t find this topic earlier.

I haven’t seen a Metal particles tutorial on here, unsure if there is anywhere … Suggesting these kind of tutorial would be awesome (Particles, particles simulation/collisions, shaders, etc).

Well, for placing any “UI” element behind a “Node”, the idea is that the SKView should be on top of the UI elements.
A default project would have the main view of the ViewController as being the SKView, just replace it with a normal view, build your UI, then add the SKView, in a way that it’s contents would be on top.
Now, if you want to have nodes over UI elements and others under, nothing stops you from having multiple SKViews, one with with game contents and one with particles.

For the order, you should be sure that “ignoresSiblingOrder” is set to false … Also, don’t forget the zPosition of objects (-1 would send it under other nodes).
I just committed a small update to the git repository with a very simple example of buttons over and under the snow effect, as well as a node (a black square image) to simulate wall with window and outside snow.

Also, to simulate outside elements, think about parallax movements: The wall moves at your speed, the particle’s node at twice that, and the furthermost background at half for example.

oh very cool. thanks so much for that… What I’ve noticed in general, is there are easy ways to do most everything, on iOS but there is really hardly any intuitive way to discover what the easy way is… I see so many people going through so many complicated machinations just to accomplish what can be done in so few lines of code and without so much fuss.

I’ve been starting to adopt the learning technique of just absorbing what I see and picking through for the diamonds in the rough…

I definitely would like to see some tutorials that show off the really elegant way that different developers here and there have accomplished certain types of things… whether that’s procedural level creation, or just an elegant way to draw a line (like blek, for example) or just a nice way to control a character… perhaps bad lands for example… I’m always curious to see the “best practices” way to accomplish whatever it is I do…