...experimenting in ParticlesIllusion 3, I'm trying to represent abstract leaves that fall from the trees as an alternative visual feedback for the player's health. The Health Particle Setting (HPS) is one of the selling points of my game. It harminously changes from green to red (green being good health and red is critica low health), I have explained it in a previous post in more depth, so if you want more info, go back to the older posts to find out more. I have made the particle's die off when they hit the ground and added some parameters that create different variations of size and velocity of particles, such as making bigger particles move slower than the smaller ones, add motion random and a wind force so that they simulate leaves falling.
I'm still having some minor problems with setting the particles so that they loop continuously, also each frame sequence of particles have to be saved out as PNG.files because ParticlesIllusion doesnt support AVIs with an alpha channel or 32 bit AVIs, so I've stuck to rendering the sequence of particles as PNGs with alpha, but this leads to even more problems of file sizes. For each frame of particles saved as PNG it is about 30kb, so if it as a sequence of 300 frames, this could slow down the processing of the flash game, argh trying to find ways of lowering this size. I have tested this out in Flash with a sequence of 10 frames, they are no slowdowns with this amount, but with a constant loop of 300 frames plus another 300 for the bad health feedback of the HPS will dramatically slow down the performance in flash. I now really need to consider the memory usage and if the game is feasible in running it without having lag and freeze problems that will detract the player from the experience of the game, especially in a fast-paced game like this one.
This is what the Health Particles Setting looks like with the character having full health. I will get back to you with any solutions to this problem.
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