Integrated Particle Suite
Partigen is much more than a particle engine and a few cool special effects – its an entire particle development suite. Partigen has all the tools necessary for you to create particle magic without ever leaving Flash.
No need to load an entirely new program just to make a few effects. No need to buy expensive programs that are made for just video. Partigen is only made for Flash, and it's only available in Flash.
- The Emitter Tool
- The emitter tool is the easiest way to create an emitter on your stage. Once your document is set up for Partigen, just select the emitter tool and click on the stage. Insta-particles!
- The Partigen Library
- The Partigen library is one of the most exciting features of Partigen. This is where all the emitter presets are saved, previewed, and applied. You can install new presets and particles without restarting Flash, as well as saving custom presets at design time straight to the library.
- Code-hinting, Coloring, and Completion
- Using Partigen's API in Flash, you have all the functions, parameters and documentation you'll ever need right at your fingertips.
- Components
- The Partigen Engine, the emitters themselves, and all the particles come as components for you add to your movies via the Components panel in Flash.
Realtime Particle Effects
By far, the most attractive and revolutionary feature of Partigen, is the ability to make realistic raster and vector particle effects in realtime. This goes beyond the static image sequence and lets you change every aspect of the emitter on the fly, during runtime.
Want to change the color of that smoke 10 seconds into your movie? No problem. Want to change the direction of that rain? Why not? How about making that flame bigger or smaller depending on user interaction? Easy as pie.
You see, by having everything in realtime and not already pre-rendered, Partigen opens a brand new world to interactive special effects.
No longer do you need to have a new video for each variation of an effect. Once you have the base sprites needed for an effect, there's no increase in file size if you want to make one, two, or even a thousand variations! There's also no worrying about seamlessly looping videos, since Partigen never loops - you get unique particle effects every time!
Presets That Inspire
Partigen includes over 120 preset options, spanning 3 libraries: Standard Emitters, Standard Quicksets, and Standard Flash 8.
- Standard Emitters
- These presets are fully configured emitters that are compatible with all supported versions of Flash. Each effect type is a group that has many variations within it.
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- Bubbles
- Rain
- Rocks
- Smoke
- Snow
- Sparkles
- Tornadoes
- Water
- Vector
- Standard Quicksets
- These presets provide specific changes to an emitter's configuration instead of changing the entire effect. These do not change the particle source of an emitter like other emitter presets. Each group has various corresponding to the section in the emitter's IDE parameters interface.
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- General
- Tween
- Physics
- Life
- Color
- Standard Flash 8
- These presets are for users with Flash 8 or higher installed.
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- Fire
- Explosions
- Sparkles
- Misc
Customization
What use are over 120 presets if you can't even customize them? Well, only about 120 we'd imagine. That's why Partigen is one of the most configurable particle engine available. Almost any property you can imagine, and even some you never would, are available to configure from both the IDE and through ActionScript.
These properties include:
- life
- alpha over time
- color over time
- rotation over time
- scale over time
- size
- particle source
- emission rate
- burst amount
- physics or tween modes
- point, line, and box types
- and many more!
Most of these properties are also tweenable with the integrated Twease Engine on the emitters themselves. This means you can tween the properties over time, as well as over the particle's life. Very powerful.
Save, Load, and Share Configurations
Great, so you've got this awesome emitter set up just the way you like it, but what if you want to reuse it or share it with somebody else? With Partigen, this is, of course, a piece of cake. With one click, you can generate a string of text that has all of the emitter settings to make up the current emitter. Likewise, you can paste a configuration string, that a friend sent you, in the same spot, and apply those settings with a tap of the mouse.
Don't like to share? Click 'Save' instead, give your preset a name, and click 'OK' to have your preset automagically saved in the Partigen Library. You can also save a preset directly into the Partigen Library without even touching an emitter.
If you like to live a little more dynamic, you can also take that same string, paste it into a text file, and load that configuration at runtime.
Open Format Emitter Libraries
One of the most exciting features of actually using Partigen, is the Partigen Library. This panel is available right within Flash's authoring environment, and houses all of the particles and 120+ default emitter presets. This panel lets you preview emitters, manage all particles in your library, apply presets directly to your emitter, and even save your own custom emitters! This thing is so hot, you can even load new libraries without even restarting Flash.
Oh, did we forget to mention that every particle library is actually an open-format .pel file? That's right, you can create and share your very own emitter presets with ease. This XML-based format stores all of the configuration information needed to make libraries that are only limited by your imagination. The documentation available with Partigen has all you need to know to get started making your very own.
Easy and Powerful AS2 API
While the IDE is great for configuring and designing emitters, creating much more interactive and dynamic effects is easy with Partigen's very powerful API.
In total, there are over 19 methods, 5 events, and 77 properties at your disposal to control every aspect of Partigen that you wish. It's designed to be easy for those who aren't very experienced with ActionScript, yet powerful enough for those who are able do what they want.
Of course, everything is fully documented, along with example code built right into the Flash Help. If that wasn't enough, Partigen's API also comes with color-coding and code completion.
Partigen is also compatible with Twease, which powers tweening in the engine. Combining Partigen's advanced coding capabilities with the raw power of Twease, you have the ingredients to create some of the most sophisticated particle effects on the planet.
Motion Guides & Masks
One of the added bonuses of having emitter components, is Partigen's ability to use motion paths right within the Flash authoring environment! With a little extra work, you can setup emitters to follow a motion guide made in Flash, and have particles trailing exactly where you want them.
Remember the good 'ol days of learning how to make masks in Flash? Well, maybe those days weren't so good. Creating dynamic masks can be a pain, but with Flash 8 and Partigen, you can take masks to a whole new level with ease.
Lean, Mean, Emitting Machine
When compared to your typical particle effect made with video, Partigen beats both file size and development/publishing speed hands down. A typical png sequence of a video file has a starting file size of anywhere between 200-500k! When you want new effects with video, you're going to MULTIPLY that amount for each additional one. Not with Partigen. The same effects (plus all the realtime benefits) can be utilized starting at less than 25k(over 15k less than the previous version), and you can add an infinite amount of variations to it without any increased file size!
Another drawback with video, is that dreaded rendering time. Every single tiny change you make, you have to re-render the entire clip. That's very time consuming, not to mention annoying and cumbersome. With Partigen, there's no render waits. In fact, since the engine and emitters are already pre-compiled components, testing your movie in Flash is almost instantaneous.
Sure you can think of Partigen as an innovative particle solution, but we like to think of it as an investment. An investment that will be saving you time from rendering and working with multiple programs, saving bandwidth costs with the much smaller file sizes, and saving money from buying expensive video applications and hardware. With savings like these, maybe you'll be able to enjoy your life just a little bit more.
Unrivaled Debugging
One of the most lacking features of any Flash engine, even Flash itself, is its debugging capabilities. As you can guess, Partigen changes all of that. With its own built-in debugging system, Partigen offers 3-level output debugging, along with self-verifying emitters. It's almost as if it would take more effort to make a mistake, than it would to fix it.
When you're creating and working with emitters via ActionScript, you'll soon find Partigen's output to be heavenly. It lets you know what the engine is doing, and it does so in the most efficient way possible. The format and contents of each trace message have undergone numerous rewrites over the engine's development, and display the most important information.
- Level 0 - Turns output off
- Level 1 - Displays basic information such as when emitters are created or methods ran
- Level 2 - Displays intensive per-particle information when each particle is born or dies
One of the most time consuming phases of development is figuring out what's wrong with your code. What if we could help you actually prevent those times?
With Partigen, critical and informative information is what's delivered. In 1.1, Partigen gives you all the necessary checks and information, without the complications and unnecessary bloat of emitter verifications. Since emitters created with the components are setup to run correctly, there's now no need to recheck at runtime.
It's these simple things that prevent those "Why isn't my emitter doing what I want it to?!" moments. You'll thank us later.
Comprehensive Documentation
What's a great program without the documentation to use it? While most will find Partigen easy to use, we've included everything from the basics to the most advanced ActionScript, including a few tutorials to boot.
Over 140 pages of it in fact. Quantity is nothing without quality, so every method and property has a complete description and explanation of its use and function, as well as extensive code examples for each. A good month's worth of work went into pure documentation goodness, we hope you'll actually use it.
The docs are available right within Flash's help, or online via docs.desuade.com
Backwards, Forwards, and Sideways Compatibility
One of the requirements when building the first Partigen engine, was to ensure that it was totally compatible with as many Flash Player versions and Flash Authoring Environments as possible. This is so important, it gets its own page.
Fully Supported Flash Player Versions:
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- Lite 2.0
- Lite 2.1
- Lite 3.0
Supported Flash Versions:
- MX2004 7.2
- 8
- CS3
You'll never have to worry about compatibility, or the latest codec - Partigen is made for maximum compatibility. That's right, you can even use Partigen on mobile devices!*
While you can publish to older swf versions, it's recommended to publish in Flash 8 or higher to get the best performance. There is also an add-on provided for Flash 8 or higher, which has special emitters that use Flash 8's specific features, such as fire.
*Supports Flash Lite 2.0 or higher. This has not been tested outside of software device emulation.