Urgent: Particle Behaviours

[Boombostak]

We really need to lock down the particle behaviours and collisions. The current build (Sunday at 9;29am) has the particle behaviour scripts unlinked from the prefabs. If you're working on new scripts, let me know. This thing needs to be functional and tested by this afternoon.

[stuarthoye]

I'm putting as much time into this as I can. It's nowhere near as much effort as you're making, but it's what I can do.

Here's an idea for how we can go about this: To structure the instantiation of a new particle, we need every particle in a scene to be the child of a parent, co-ordinating object. That co-ordinator holds references to each existing particle, and tracks all newly instantiated particles. When two particles collide in-scene, they send a message to their parent containing all the information needed to create a new particle (color, motion, etc.). The parent generates the visual effects, destroys the existing particles, and spawns the new one.

If a particle decays, it also sends a message to the parent, which performs these same operations, but creates two particles and destroys one.

[stuarthoye]

What are your thoughts? And what time do you want to have this tested by?

[Boombostak]

My current solution to this is to spawn the Chemical Reaction at the point of collision, and then cull the colliding objects. The Chemical Reaction has a slight delay before spawning a new particle, so this should work alright.

I don't understand the parent-messaging solution. We should just assign this to somebody and try to crack it out.

[stuarthoye]

We talked about disabling the colliders of the particles on collision, then spawning the new particle. I think this ought to work.

We also spoke about enabling/disabling fundamental particles when they collide (rather than destroying & instantiating every time). This could cut down on the overhead incurred by repeatedly allocating and freeing memory for the objects.