How to Fork a Particle

ONE OF THE nice things about conferences like GDC is that you get to see some cool products you would never hear about otherwise.

Fork Particle is just that, a middleware engine that designs, tweaks, and runs particle systems in your game.

There are three parts to Fork, one tine is called Particle Studio, another the Runtime SDK, and the last is a Live Tuner. It goes like this: the studio is basically a paint and modeling program for particles, you make pretty things in it, and they edit and run in real time.

Fork Particle creation application

From there, you use the SDK to integrate the pretty stuff you drew/modeled into your game, and hopefully it just works. This is middleware, so it should integrate with most other middleware with little effort. Fork Particle is pretty well limited in what it does, so that should ease integration as well.

The last part is Live Tuner, basically a tool to optimise your pretty and well-integrated Forked particles. If you have an effect that takes a quad core Xeon to its knees for half an hour, gameplay may suffer. Tuner helps you avoid both things like this and less extreme situations as well.

Fork Particle is out for the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3, you can even get a free trial from the site. The program is sold on a royalty-free, per title, per developer basis. Given its limited scope, it probably won't break the bank.

Turbine and EA are clients, Lego Universe and Empire Earth 3 use the middleware, and so do a host of others. If you are a gamer, you may have been using this technology for a while and not even know it.

Good middleware does that. µ