Here's my wishlist on what I currently see missing from the FX editor that would give us greater flexibility with the effects we can create.
1) Random particle start size.
2) Random particle velocity.
3) Gravity over time scale.
4) Gravity values beyond 1.
5) Air Resistance over time scale.
6) Align to path trajectory.
7) Non-Uniform size over time scale.
8.) Particle spawn radius with x,y,z. (== random offset)
9) Step or difference options for random range values
example (0/3/0) outputs as 0.0000, 0.0001, 0.0002... ...0.2999, 3.0000
and (1/3/0.5) outputs as 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0
and (2/3/1) outputs as 2, 3
Syntax
(Min/Max/Increment)
10) x,y,z rotation speeds for non-billboards.
11) Max/Min rotation values with Loop/PingPong/Stop options.
12) Physical container wrap for emitted emitters to attain gravity. (see #22)
13) "Do Not Follow Parent" to work for emitted emitters.
14) Rigid body emitter with vector/angle/velocity and disabled size.
15) Scale rate to emitter velocity option to increase a contrail thickness for faster objects.
16) Noise frequence and phase for emitted trails to slow it down, but retain large motion.
17) A viewport grid.
18) Ability to load in a template object for size reference (might do this already).
19) Freelook camera mode.
20) Particle luminosity over time scale.
21) Particle collision. Readable if possible.
22) Turn particles into emitters that we can start based on collision or decay.
23) Sprite animation sequence images with support for cycle speed and termination options.
So that's a nice list? Some are a little nutty.
Some of the things that I can't do right away are things like an explosion with a contrail piece of debris that leaves an arcing trail of smoke that's not too unsimilar to this image:
If somebody has a way to achieve that, please let me know. Basically I wanted to shoot out a sphere and have that spawn particles and have those exibit no motion in world space. That would cover it.
I tried to emit an emitter and that actually works, but is only good for something like fireworks or a spark explosion as the emitters don't have any parameters available once they're spawned on their vector and told what velocity. They're not open to take the other movement parameters such as gravity, so they only travel in perfectly linear paths.
That means that really the only way I can see this happening is for me to create a static smoke effect that will just emit puffs in place and then attach that to a phyics object and write a script to send it on its way. That's harder than if we could have each particle act as an emitter.
I can acheive absolute flawless effects of literally any nature should most of the above get addressed and put into the engine. They really are great features that will help us all and many of them are quite standard even for real-time fx.
Quite soon I'm going to be focusing on creating a standard set of explosions, fires, puffs of smoke/dust/grass, waterfalls, fountains, drips, leaves, rain, snow, bugs...etc aswell as a series of splashes and bullet impact effects of several surfaces like wood, metal, cloth...etc. These I will make freely available in a package for all GC devs. Right now I only have a couple of them done as I get familiar with it, but so far it's easy enough. I can do gibs too. I won't be requiring it, but I will be delivering an effect of great bloody magnitude and gore just because I really enjoy making it. Some of what I've done is silly, like rising spirits out of graves, but most all are visually impressive in that the fx editor is actually quite robust as it stands. It's not perfect, but it's dang close and there's a short list of things it's missing in retrospect to make it so.
Here's my pipedreams just in case:
1) Emission of objects retaining UV animation aswell as skeletal animation.
2) Particle attraction, flocking and other robust behaviors.
3) Particle born crowd simulations with goal values.
4) Particle follow path option with the ability to generate a flight path.
5) Emit particles from the surface of a mesh.
