frozen particle systems

Hi everyone…

i’ve been trying to get my first particle system up and running for a while now, i’ve rewritten it three times and consulted numerous websites for tutorials and source code but i’m stuck by one problem…

i can get a system running and rendering but it only renders the system once… it never seems to use my update function… which is bizarre because i’m calling the update function (which goes through the array of particles in a system and adds the velocity to each particles’ position once per frame) in glut’s display function directly before i call the render function…

this has got me really annoyed… because for the life of me i can’t figure out why particles[i].pos += particles[i].velocity; isn’t doing what it should… it seems straight forward enough… i can send the source code if someone is kind enough to actually want to take a look at it… just send me an email at plucky@lumiere.net (its relatively simple c++, a particle class, and an abstract particle system class with a snowfall particle system class derived from the abstract base)

i appreciate any advice, cause i’m stuck…

thanks…

—brian
plucky@lumiere.net

ok… i got them moving now… but there’s some wierd artifacts… some of the particles are normal size, but a bunch of them are stretched really strangely…

that and they are all moving in unison… which is kind of annoying… how would i go about getting a truly random downward velocity?

Originally posted by plucky:
that and they are all moving in unison… which is kind of annoying… how would i go about getting a truly random downward velocity?

When you create a particle assign it a random velocity vector …
If you need some advice drop me a mail
adios