I see that Particle Candy is now available for download. Price is €39.95
Before I buy, has anyone already downloaded it and tried it inside of Corona? I’d love to hear your feedback and whether it lives up to your expectations in terms of ease of use, quality of effects, etc.
Thanks! [import]uid: 9905 topic_id: 4011 reply_id: 304011[/import]
URL for purchase and download is http://www.x-pressive.com/ParticleCandy_Corona/download.html [import]uid: 9905 topic_id: 4011 reply_id: 12143[/import]
I’ve bought it, it’s great. I believe there is a demo available so you can try it out first.
Send them an email http://www.x-pressive.com/ParticleCandy_Corona/support.html [import]uid: 9371 topic_id: 4011 reply_id: 12146[/import]
To answer a few questions:
Games using Particle Candy:
There are currently several games in development using Particle Candy for Corona and we’ll present them on our website as soon as they are available. We’ll set up a showcase section on our site, so we are happy if you’d send us a description and screenshots of your Corona apps using Particle Candy. It’s predecessor (Particle Candy for Blitz3D) is used for a couple of years now in many commercial game titles on the market and lots of the experience we made went into the Corona version of it.
Ease of Use:
Particle Candy is very straightforward to use -just create one or more emitters, attach one or more particle types to it and trigger it whenever you want to. That’s it -no cryptic parameters, no exotic commands, just everything you need to create effects within a few minutes. Just define some effects (particle types), attach them to emitters and Particle Candy will do all the rest for you. You don’t have to mess around with dozens of code lines, keeping track of any objects or updating any graphics etc. This is all done automatically. Just trigger your emitter and that’s it.
We posted a quickstart tutorial on the Particle Candy website:
Particle Candy Quickstart
Performance:
How fast is Particle Candy? It’s not easy to answer this question, because this heavily depends on the type of effect, how many particles you are using, how many processing power the rest of your game needs, which device you are targeting etc. What we know for sure, however, is that Particle Candy for Corona is as fast as a Corona lib could be providing such a set of features. We tried our best to performance-optimize every single line of code and performance is still our primary goal. The final speed, however, primarily depends on Corona’s mass handling of display objects and how wisely you are using Particle Candy within your project. We posted some performance hints to give you some guidelines:
Particle Candy Performance Hints
Quality of Effects:
While Particle Candy provides all features you need to create automated particle- and special effects, the visual appearance of the effects greatly depends on how you are using it. You are literally free to create every effect you like to.
The most important part for visual appearance are the particle type properties (as described in detail on the website). You can alter almost any aspect of particles: alpha, fading, scaling, lifetime, movement, direction, velocity, weight and, and, and…
Another important part of the visual apperance is the particle image used. Most particle effects like water, fire, smoke etc. are created using a few standard graphics (to produce smoke, you generally use a graphic that contains a “fluffy puff”, for example). By replacing this image (keeping all other particle settings the same) you can add a completely different look to the same effect. There are endless possible combinations.
There are more than two dozens of short, clean, easy-to-understand sample codes included in the package (all samples you have seen in the videos are included as full sources, including all graphics used). You can copy-and-paste the codes right into your own project or use the included particle graphics as a good starting point to create your own effects.
We are also working on a free library with pre-defined copy-and-paste effects like fire, explosions, smokes etc., all ready to use.
Of course, we’re still missing blend modes which would double the visual quality at least, especially with pyro effects etc. -but I’m very optimistic that the next versions of Corona will provide this. If so, you’ll receive an update within hours that makes full use of it. [import]uid: 10504 topic_id: 4011 reply_id: 12154[/import]
Hi dweezil – looks like they removed their free download trial. I went ahead and purchased it. Should be fun to play with. I’m looking forward to seeing some interesting implementations! [import]uid: 9905 topic_id: 4011 reply_id: 12175[/import]
I used Particle Candy in many Blitz games. See here
www.boiledsweets.com [import]uid: 9371 topic_id: 4011 reply_id: 12181[/import]
I bought it too, not had a chance to play around with it yet though because finishing up a project but should be starting the next one tomorrow so I’ll have some fun with it then
Ace [import]uid: 9899 topic_id: 4011 reply_id: 12466[/import]
Could someone post a ‘fireworks’ sample?
seems like it is very obvious and easy to make, but haven’t figure it out yet.
also, might be good idea to post simple video tutorials for newbies to follow 
Thanks,
RD [import]uid: 7856 topic_id: 4011 reply_id: 15661[/import]
Here you are (please unzip to your Particle Candy folder):
It uses four emitters -one that randomly launches a rocket and three explosion emitters (a red one, a green and a blue one). The “rocket” emitter has a kill listener attached. As soon as a rocket “dies”, it will trigger an explosion on it’s current position. It’s quite simple.
Notice that “one shot emission” is used with all emitters (see manual). This emits the particles instantly, not over time.
Note: the rockets are launched randomly, so you’ll have to wait a few seconds to see something.
Kind Regards,
Mike
[import]uid: 10504 topic_id: 4011 reply_id: 15732[/import]
This is awesome. I’m glad I bought it. Too bad I haven’t had enough time to properly play with it 
[import]uid: 10835 topic_id: 4011 reply_id: 15752[/import]
Nice job, Mike! I wanted to see a lot more fireworks (like in a finale) so I changed line 194 to
[lua]if math.ceil(math.random() * 100) >= 10 then [/lua]
for 10x as many. Impressive! [import]uid: 9905 topic_id: 4011 reply_id: 15761[/import]
I’m new to corona and try to work on a simple action game using movement and collision (no physics behaviour needed).
Coming with a (light) as3 background I have began to do it the “hard” way, programming movement functions and collisons routines. Then I realized I could do it the box2D way, discarding the physic engine (with gravity set to 0 and kinematic object) just using collision events. I’m not sure if using such a library to do so little (only collision detection) is wise.
Then I found particle candy and I must admit I’m impressed by the work xpressive put in the library and the effects available.
A little voice is telling me “hey, don’t be lazy, code yourself ! it’s not that hard to code movement and collision, minimal code will optimize performance”, but on the other hand I’m answering to the little voice “this guy is far better than me for lua coding and I bet he did his best to make things flow”.
That was some thoughts before getting or not the engine. If you encoutered the same questions, it would be cool you’d shared your opinions.
By the way, I was wondering if imagePath = image.png supports Dynamic-resolution images ? [import]uid: 9328 topic_id: 4011 reply_id: 15775[/import]
I just had a chance to test the fireworks demo…AWESOME!!!
THANKS A LOT!!!
RD [import]uid: 7856 topic_id: 4011 reply_id: 15901[/import]
Hey Antheor. I recently purchased this and it is great. Sure you could write the code yourself, but to get all the great features it would take a lot of time/work.
My view is that the price and excellent product features make the purchase a no-brainer. I am sure you value your own time (as do we all). Say your time is worth 50 bucks an hour ( or whatever). So, this library is costing you the same as one hour of work. It sure would take a lot longer than that to make something similar to Particle Candy.
Also, all the time you don’t spend on re-inventing the wheel can be spent on making your game better or other important tasks.
Anyway, that is my opinion. I am a very satisfied customer.
Cheers,
Peter
[import]uid: 13932 topic_id: 4011 reply_id: 17850[/import]
Thx for your comment Peter. I indeed plan to buy Particle very soon. [import]uid: 9328 topic_id: 4011 reply_id: 17907[/import]
*deleted* [import]uid: 72520 topic_id: 4011 reply_id: 94071[/import]
Hi all, does anyone know how to create multiple instances of particle candy? I.e. so we can pause all particles in one instance, while the particles in another instance can continue.
Thanks for your time 
[import]uid: 35618 topic_id: 4011 reply_id: 115884[/import]