The hardcoded age limit is now gone. The behavior can be implemented
with an Age Reached Event and Kill Particle node. Other utility nodes
to handle age limits of particles can be added later. Adding an
Age Limit attribute to particles on birth will be useful for some effects,
e.g. when you want to control the color or size of a particle over its
life time.
The Random Float node takes a seed currently. Different nodes will
produce different values even with the same seed. However, the same
node will generate the same random number for the same seed every
time. The "Hash" of a particle can be used as seed. Later, we'd want
to have more modes in the node to make it more user friendly.
Modes could be: Per Particle, Per Time, Per Particle Per Time,
Per Node Instance, ...
Also a Random Vector node will be useful, as it currently has to be
build using three Random Float nodes.
Previously, there were only particle-birth and time-step events.
Now the solver can handle custom events. On the user level
this does not change anything yet. This feature of the solver
will be used by an upcoming Age Reached Event node and
possibly others. When this node exists, I can finally remove
the hardcoded maximum particle age.
The following nodes work now (although things can still be improved of course):
Particle Birth Event, Praticle Time Step Event, Set Particle Attribute and Execute Condition.
Multiple Set Particle Attribute nodes can be chained using the "Execute" sockets.
They will be executed from left to right.
A particle action is some function that is triggered by some event.
Right now, users cannot control this. There is just a
randomize-velocity on-birth action. So the direction of spawned
particles is slightly randomized now.
This also adds a new integer attribute called "Hash" which is
useful for a number of things. Mainly for generating random numbers
for a specific particle. The ID of a particle is not necessarily a good source
of randomness.
This is a convenience wrapper for `Map<Key, Vector<Value>>`.
It does not provide any performance benefits (yet). I need this
kind of map in a couple of places and before I was duplicating
the lookup logic in many places.
High quality emitters need to maintain state themselves. For example,
this it needs to remember when it spawned the last particle.
This is especially important when the birth rate is changing over time.
Otherwise, there will be very visible artifacts.
It is quite likely that other components of the simulation need their own
state as well. Therefore, I refactored the `SimulationState` type a bit,
to make it more extensible. Instead of using hardcoded type numbers, a
string is used to identify the state type. Also, instead of having switch
statements in many places, there is a new `SimulationStateType` that
encapsulates information about how a specific state is created/freed/copied/...
I removed the integration with the point cache for now, because it was
not used anyway in it's current state.
Object sockets work now, but only the new Object Transforms and the
Particle Mesh Emitter node use it. The emitter does not actually
use the mesh surface yet. Instead, new particles are just emitted around
the origin of the object.
Internally, handles to object data blocks are passed around in the network,
instead of raw object pointers. Using handles has a couple of benefits:
* The caller of the function has control over which handles can be resolved
and therefore limit access to specific data. The set of data blocks that
is accessed by a node tree should be known statically. This is necessary
for a proper integration with the dependency graph.
* When the pointer to an object changes (e.g. after restarting Blender),
all handles are still valid.
* When an object is deleted, the handle is invalidated without causing crashes.
* The handle is just an integer that can be stored per particle and can be cached easily.
The mapping between handles and their corresponding data blocks is
stored in the Simulation data block.
This updates the usage of integer types in code I wrote according to our new style guides.
Major changes:
* Use signed instead of unsigned integers in many places.
* C++ containers in blenlib use `int64_t` for size and indices now (instead of `uint`).
* Hash values for C++ containers are 64 bit wide now (instead of 32 bit).
I do hope that I broke no builds, but it is quite likely that some compiler reports
slightly different errors. Please let me know when there are any errors. If the fix
is small, feel free to commit it yourself.
I compiled successfully on linux with gcc and on windows.
