Particle System - How to Store Particle Age?

Warning! Some information on this page is older than 6 years now. I keep it for reference, but it probably doesn't reflect my current knowledge and beliefs.

Wed
12
Dec 2012

Particle effects are nice because they are simple and look interesting. Besides, coding it is fun. So I code it again :) Particle systems can have state (when parameters of each particle are calculated based on previous values and time step) or stateless (when parameters are always recalculated from scratch using fixed function and current time). My current particle system has the state.

Today a question came to my mind about how to store age of a particle to delete it after some expiration time, determined by the emitter and also unique for each particle. First, let's think for a moment about the operations we need to perform on this data. We need to: 1. increment age by time step 2. check if particle expired and should be deleted.

If that was all, the solution would be simple. It would be enough to store just one number, let's call it TimeLeft. Assigned to the particle life duration at the beginning, it would be:

Step with dt: TimeLeft = TimeLeft - dt
Delete if: TimeLeft <= 0

But what if we additionally want to determine the progress of the particle lifetime, e.g. to interpolate its color of other parameters depending on it? The progress can be expressed in seconds (or whatever time unit we use) or in percent (0..1). My first idea was to simply store two numbers, expressed in seconds: Age and MaxAge. Age would be initialized to 0 and MaxAge to particle lifetime duration. Then:

Step with dt: Age = Age + dt
Delete if: Age > MaxAge
Progress: Age
Percent progress: Age / MaxAge

Looks OK, but it involves costly division. So I came up with an idea of pre-dividing everything here by MaxAge, thus defining new parameters: AgeNorm = Age / MaxAge (which goes from 0 to 1 during particle lifetime) and AgeIncrement = 1 / MaxAge. Then it gives:

Step with dt: AgeNorm = AgeNorm + dt * AgeIncrement
Delete if: AgeNorm > 1
Progress: Age / AgeIncrement
Percent progress: AgeNorm

This needs additional multiplication during time step and division when we want to determine progress in seconds. But as I consider progress in percent more useful than the absolute progress value in seconds, that's my solution of choice for now.

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