Random #7 - attack of the view bots

This blog seems to be under "attack" by bots or something. For the last month I'm getting ten times more daily views than the average was. It started on September 30th. Every few hours the statistics shows a spike of 30 new views, and every day the same thing. The views are coming from USA, operating system is Macintosh and the browser is Chrome, but it shows no referring site or anything to pinpoint the source. It has made the statistics data completely useless.

Particle effects

Here is a video showing the updated particle system and editor, and some stuff that can be done with them.

It was all inspired by Unreal Engine particle system. Particle effects can contain several emitters and emitter and particle values are not just variables they are "modules" with "distributions" and stuff to control the values over time, etc. There are around 30 of these modules; emitter and particle lifetime, particle width, height, speed, direction, color, angle, number of particles on init/on update... Each effect, and even particles, can have dynamic light attached to them. Also, particles can be attached to a Box2D body, but then some of the functions wont work (particle position will be updated by Box2D and not by emitter functions). I also implemented ribbon and beam/line emitters.

Here is what you can see in the video:
- Fireworks - shows "nested" effects. Each particle can carry its own effect(rocket trail) and also can create a new one at the end of its life(explosion).
- Text - various line effects. The lightning effect uses a tilemap.
- Circles - nothing special, just a bunch of circular effects.
- Sparks - shows Box2D enabled particles. Particles change rotation and size based on velocity.
- Ribbons - ribbon effect can be attached to other particles or objects.
- Flamethrower - shows effect and individual particle lights, and also collision response (creating ground fire on particle-ground contact).
- Colored lights - shows particles with colored dynamic light.
- Paint explosions - shows creation of decals on contact on static and moving objects.
- Particle effect editor - shows how one effect can be made of several particle emitters.
- Leafs - shows direction change using a sin wave.

***

Updating, saving, parsing, then the editor code itself.... it's well over 5000 lines of code. It all became over complicated and confusing and I don't know does it even make any sense anymore, I just lack the knowledge to design such a complicated system. Quake 2D didn't even have a particle system, it was all hand made and hardcoded, and it still worked. I have been working on the particle effects until March and then completely stopped. Then fooled around with Abuse SDL and haven't coded since. I wanted to post this way back in March, but just didn't want to bother anymore.