CompuServe Thread

Hi Eric, Here's the scoop on Magic. Don't use Magic3, instead use Magic4. A little background: When Magic3 was created, it was created to do a Tinkerbell effect. In this effect, a few particles are released on frame 1, a few more on frame 2 and so on. This is what we called RAMP. The number of particles visible on the screen would increase over time. But then I thought – what about a bomb fuse where the life of a particle is very short. In this case, if you set the number of particles to 100, you would want 100 particles on every frame – this would mean a life span of 1 frame. We called this CONTINUOUS. That is to say that the number of particles is the same on every frame. Well this turned out to be too confusing because everyone thought that CONTINUOUS meant a continuous stream of particles. And when they used CONTINUOUS with a life over 1 or 2, weird things happened. Oh well, live and learn. So on to Magic4 where we removed the whole RAMP CONTINUOUS option. Now if you have LIFE set to 1 – MAGIC automatically simulates the 'Bomb Fuse' mode. Besides that MAGIC4 is about 600% faster. I apologize for the confusion. We have been working on major Particle system enhancements for 3DS and will let you know more about this product shortly. If there are any more questions let me know. David – Digimation