Announcing Support for Particle Designer 2.0

21 March 2014

Announcing Support for Particle Designer 2.0

Brent Sorrentino
Corona SDK, News & Announcements

A good particle system is important for games and we are pleased to announce support for Particle Designer 2.0, one of the best particle effects editors in the market. If you’re a Corona Pro or Enterprise subscriber, you can begin using this feature immediately, starting with Daily Build #2214 or later.

Key Features

Particle Designer 2.0, used by many major studios, offers cool features to mobile developers, including:

High Configurability — 48 properties allow you to create wildly unique effects.
Multiple Emitters — Support for multiple simultaneous particle systems.
Realtime Preview — Watch particles immediately morph to reflect your property changes.
Drag-and-Drop — Full drag-and-drop support for background and particle images.

Particle Designer + Corona SDK

Adding Particle Designer effects to a Corona project is as simple as 1-2-3…

When the particle system meets your expectations in Particle Designer, export it as a JSON file.
Open and decode the JSON file within Lua and pass it to display.newEmitter().
Move and rotate emitters like any other display object, either via direct property settings or transitions.

Ready to Begin?

If you’re ready to dive in, you can download Particle Designer 2.0 and start experimenting with amazing particle effects in Corona Daily Build #2204 or later. In the meantime, watch for a Particle Designer tutorial, coming soon!

Tags:

particle designer, particles

Brent Sorrentino

[email protected]

Brent Sorrentino is a full-time Developer Evangelist and technical writer who assists others with game development, code, and in overcoming other challenges to help them bring their app dreams to life.

28 Comments

Danny Glover
Posted at 10:06h, 21 March

Wow!

Fantastic to see this come out! Great work Corona Team and thank you so much for adding this 🙂
Ingemar
Posted at 10:10h, 21 March

Cool!
Benny
Posted at 10:23h, 21 March

So loooong overdue but SO welcome. And just in time for the final polish of my game’s graphics 😀
BeyondtheTech
Posted at 10:29h, 21 March

Nice! Been a Particle Candy user for years, so this is an interesting development. Are there any promotions or deals that 71Squared will be offering as a result of this collaboration with Corona Labs?
Benny
Posted at 10:34h, 21 March

Never mind. Mac only. 🙁
- Albert Yale
  Posted at 12:23h, 21 March
  
  The Particle Designer tool is Mac-only, but the JSON/PNG files exported by the tool will work on all platforms supported by the Corona SDK.
Voyak
Posted at 14:24h, 21 March

I wonder if someone could write converter from PEX to JSON so Windows users could use something like this one i dug up from the mists of the internet:

http://onebyonedesign.com/flash/particleeditor/

It exports PNG and PEX. I’m sure it doesnt have so many features as PD2 but it’s working on that “worse” system, heheh 😉
Frode
Posted at 14:30h, 21 March

Hi.
I’ve just got Particle Designer, but I’m not able to export in JSON!?!? All the other formats works but not JSON? Any one have a solution?

Frode
- Brent Sorrentino
  Posted at 14:49h, 21 March
  
  Hi Frode,
  If you click on the “gear” icon to the right of “Export”, isn’t one of the options for “Export Type” JSON?
Mike Daley
Posted at 14:54h, 21 March

I just wanted to drop in a comment that if anyone has problems exporting JSON from Particle Designer they should check for updates from the Particle Designer main menu as there is already a fix for this problem.

If anyone has any questions about Particle Designer just drop an email to [email protected]

Mike
- Frode
  Posted at 14:07h, 22 March
  
  Updating helped 🙂 Now JSON export works!
Peter Dwyer
Posted at 17:21h, 21 March

Mac only?

Wow that’s a huge oversight.
JCP
Posted at 22:19h, 21 March

How does Particle Designer 2.0 compare with Particle Candy?
- Damir
  Posted at 04:17h, 22 March
  
  Using Particle Candy, so wondering the same.
  
  Why move from Particle Candy to this?
Chris
Posted at 01:30h, 22 March

So how long before it’ll be available in a public build?
Lerg
Posted at 04:32h, 22 March

Just to be clear.
It’s not GPU particles, but PNG files as particles, right?
- Brent Sorrentino
  Posted at 16:05h, 22 March
  
  Yes, the particles are image files, not vector objects.
Frode
Posted at 16:35h, 22 March

Remember to uncheck the “Embed” option when you export to JSON. You’ll need the “particle”.JSON AND the “particle”.png file 🙂 Otherwise you get the graphic embedded inside the JSON and that don’t seem to work….
- Brent Sorrentino
  Posted at 16:43h, 22 March
  
  Thanks for noting this Frode… it’s a detail that will be covered in the upcoming tutorial. Corona does not support embedded textures and no plans are in the works to support it, so you must un-check the Embed option.
  - J. A. Whye
    Posted at 04:38h, 23 March
    
    Would be nice for some kind of tool to turn the embedded string back into an image, otherwise I think the community library of Particle Designer is useless for all Corona SDK users. 🙁
    - Frode
      Posted at 13:09h, 23 March
      
      I’ve taken particles from the community part and I think it does what you want. At least for me 🙂
    - Mike
      Posted at 10:34h, 24 March
      
      If you find a particle setup from the community library you like you can switch off embed in the particle settings (small gear icon above the particle systems list). When you then export it will export the image that was embedded in the shared emitter as a separate PNG file so you can use the output with Corona.
      - J. A. Whye
        Posted at 13:25h, 24 March
        
        Awesome! I hadn’t tried that yet. Thanks!
[email protected]
Posted at 17:00h, 22 March

View – Zoom Out does not work (just zooms in),.

Looks buggy 🙁
- Mike
  Posted at 03:00h, 23 March
  
  Hi Simon. Are you zooming in using the keyboard/menu or the pinch gesture on the track pad. There are no known issues with zooming and no problems we can see, so if there is something you have spotted any info you can send to [email protected] will be great so we can look into it.
Jacques
Posted at 21:51h, 23 March

So still wondering about the speed of particle designer vs particle candy, anyone got comments about that?
Mario Roberti
Posted at 14:43h, 24 March

Yes!!!! Very cool, we’ve been sorely lacking a visual drag n’ drop editor for our particles amongst other things. This is a welcome addition to our toolbox as Corona developers!

-Mario
Martin
Posted at 14:08h, 10 July

Just downloaded this. Doesn’t seem to be possible to fade out particles. 🙁