Good day to you all again, my few-and-far-between readers! Welcome, one and all, to what you may already have ascertained is in fact the hundredth discrete outpouring of textual miscellany to grace the monitors of its unfortunate readers. Those of you who have already managed to stumble upon this site before and are (amazingly) visiting again may have noticed that I've decided to mark this occasion with a complete visual redesign. This is in no way linked to Blogger's new, more advanced 'Template designer' page being released today. I hope you'll agree that it looks much nicer than the dull, flat and lifeless look it once bore. And if you don't, well, bollocks to you. It's my blog.
So! What lies on the programme for this milestone of a post? Well, remember that ultra-secret project I alluded to in the last post? The project so secret I daren't even mention it within this particular paragraph?
This is a project I've been working on for about a week now. It's essentially an advanced particle effects engine for use in pygame, and it supports all sorts of nifty features. Most significantly, almost every parameter available is fully keyframeable, which lets you create fairly complex animations. Also handy:
(Theoretically) infinite number of particle sources
(Theoretically) infinite number of gravities (used for influencing particles' paths), which can be either point gravity (following Newton's law of gravitation) or constant gravity in one direction
Several particle drawtypes, from the standard points and images to more exotic types like bubbles
Simple interface which also allows plenty of freedom - if you don't like its keyframing system, you could even write your own outwith the library and use it to control parameters of library objects. Anything's possible with a bit of faffing around
Physics system (currently under development) to allow you to insert obstacles for particles to collide with and bounce off
Basically, it makes the difficult and arduous task of implementing real-time, interactive particle effects quick and simple. So, this shall be the new focus of this blog's output as we stride onwards into what I hope will be a second hundred posts. Accordingly, I've updated the information on the right-hand side of the page with links to the project's Launchpad page (where you can find its source code and track its progress without relying on me getting around to writing about it here) its screenshot gallery (where, funnily enough, I'll post screenshots of it in action) and its pygame project page. Check them out! As they say. So, I suppose all that remains now is to sign off this milestone post with a grandiose rendering of its number:
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