Hello everyone!
I’ve been hard at work for the past 7 months on a huge update to Desuade Partigen 2 and just finished the open source ActionScript 3 libraries last night.
If you don’t know, Partigen (http://desuade.com/partigen) was the first complete particle effects engine for Flash in AS2 over 4 years ago, and December '09 was the release of the brand new AS3 version Partigen 2.0 after a year of development. It was also the first time the source code was opened up to the community for free under the MIT license.
Version 2.5 introduces some amazing new features:
[LIST]
[]pixel renderer and pixel-based effects
[]tremendously improved performance and memory management with new object pooling for particles, particle sources, and tweens
[]support for particle filters and XML filter support
[]renderers start/stop automagically without needing to do it manually anymore
[]caching particles as bitmaps
[]more rendering options such as predraw, removeAllParticles(), and clear()
[]improved custom Random class
[]prefetching allows you to start emitters as if the effect has already been running for a while
[]XML support for renderers
[]BitmapCanvas class allows for super easy use and duplication of Bitmap/PixelRenderers
[]blendmode support for particles
[]groupBitmaping to improve performance on particles with a high groupAmount
[]particles can now be any class, without having to extend Particle
[]all the improvements in the Desuade Motion Package
[*]plus over 50 bug fixes, tweaks, changes, and minor enhancements
[/LIST]
You can see the full change log here: http://github.com/andrewfitz/desuade/blob/master/changelog.txt
That list isn’t even including the standard feature set Partigen is known for and the already one-of-a-kind arrange of effects you can see here: http://desuade.com/partigen/demos
By now, you can see this is an incredible update that makes creating Flash particle effects easier and even more beautiful.
I wanted to give you a day’s advanced head up, as the official announcement isn’t until tomorrow, so you can** download it now directly here:** http://desuade.com/download/partigen?version=250
I just finished this yesterday, so expect some more demos and updates on http://desuade.com/ sometime soon!
Cheers,
Andrew