Under the Bridge

So that awesome toy^H^H^H development assistant Particle Designer that we mentioned a while back is now officially released and you can download it from its new website — for only $7.99 USD, what a deal we’ve got ours! — and there is a completely unexpected (by us, anyways) feature; it integrates directly with cocos2d.

Yep, cocos2d 0.99.3-rc released today has support for Particle Designer:

In order to use the particles created with it you should:

1. Download & Register Particle Designer (you need to register it in order to save the particles)

2. Use the “cocos2d (plist)” format when saving the texture (you can embed the texture or not. cocos2d supports both format)

To load a particle created with Particle Designer you should do:

// Either you can create a Quad particle system

id particleSystem = [CCQuadParticleSystem particleWithFile:@"MyParticle.plist"];

// …or a Point particle system.

id particleSystem = [CCPointParticleSystem particleWithFile:@"MyParticle.plist"];

cocos2d supports all the Particle Designer features…

It’s just like getting a heaping helping of awesome sauce on your awesome sundae, isn’t it now?

[UPDATE: And now with tutorial video!]