In this project I am attempting to create a particle engine from scratch using OpenGL, having never programmed in openGL I am looking forward to the challenge and increasing my knowledge of other languages and APIs, I have heard a lot of interesting things about OpenGL and looked at the OpenGL vs. DirectX ongoing debate, first impression it seems OpenGL is just as capable as directX if not more. OpenGL seems to get features out quicker and has been slightly ahead in certain areas with openGL having some of the features DirectX11 has years ago. I like that anybody can develop extensions to openGL rather than how DirectX Microsoft dictates their extensions, I’m trying to avoid going to too much into which I think is better and remaining on the fence untill I’ve experienced OpenGL a bit more.
Having worked with DirectX for 2 years now I am a little biased and do enjoy using DirectX to create games, I could of chosen to use directX for this project but I want to see what OpenGL has to offer and would like the experience, One thing that worries me is the amount of learning resources, DirectX and Microsoft are very good at documentation and providing learning platforms such as the XNA for allowing anyone with programming experience the opportunity to develop small arcade 2d/3d games on Xbox 360 live platform. A quick look for OpenGL support and I can’t really find much support yet, I have found one or two very good tutorial websites, I think I will be relying on forums mainly however I could be totally wrong and the support could just be as good.
The project
I have 12 weeks to come up with a particle system which could be used in real time games, which means an interactive frame rate is a must, this means either 30 frames per second or 60 FPS, I will be aiming for 60 FPS and 60,000 particles rendered on screen at the same time, This is quite a modest estimation as I’ve seen some particle engines doing millions of particles, The reason I am aiming for 60k with 60fps is because most of my time will probably be spent with learning openGL, I don’t need to really push it I just need something stable and workable, then maybe later on I can optimise and squeeze more particles out of it.
Example particle engine
