I know a particle system is on the road map but I wanted to throw out the idea of supporting Particle Designer , like Cocos2d does...

http://particledesigner.71squared.com/

Just a thought!

I think this particular designer was build with Cocos2D in mind. It wouldn't be hard to develop one, once support for particles would be build into the SDK.

Tracking as case # 383. We are well aware of this, but stabilizing existing features is a bit higher priority.

Another vote for applying the ParticleDesigner over here! Particle effects are a quick way to make games look much much more professional. We need it!

ParticleDesigner comes with their engine written in Objective-C for us with OpenGL ES games. Which I think would be pretty easy to wrap and add to the Corona API. The other benefit of something like Particle Designer is the fact that a nice GUI interface for designing particles is already done, and you are able to tap in to a library of premade particle effects.

So in short, a custom Particle system would be great too but I think support for something like this is also a nice alternative!

I second this request!

While I understand the desire to have a particle engine. I don't really see this as a needed feature. There are hundreds of examples of how to write a particle engine with both code and descriptions. This would be very easy to implement using the system as is.

DIY particles using corona don't seem very efficient from my experience. I have written particle effects in corona for the ipad that run at just a few FPS on the ipod touch. It would be much better to have a well-coded objective-c particle engine nicely abstracted away in corona.
Why re-invernt the wheel in an inefficient language? Lua is awesome for rapid development, but for something so graphics-intensive as blending particles, higher level coding seems a no-brainer.

Well the heavy lifting needs to be done but the graphics subsystem for decent performance but surely the overhead of using lua isn't too large for managing a few hundred particles (Maybe I am wrong). In Q3 they are going to have OpenGL shaders. The we can make a truly nice and very fast particle implementation.

What about this? "Particle Candy for Corona iPhone SDK"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h8s8Wsn9iI

I think the limit would be writing the particle system in Lua rather than c and having Corona interpret the Lua and then generate the particles. I would assume it would be a lot faster integrating something directly into the Corona engine.

Looking at Particle Candy, it looks cool but having experimented myself with particles I would say hitting a number about 50 / 60 particles generated in Lua doesnt give much processing power left for all the other in game stuff. Also bloom and other effects are necessary to get true particles working otherwise they will usually appear as individual objects rather then merging together.

There are some really nice particles animation apps out there ( cant actually remember the one I use! ) and others have written small free apps that generate explosions and stuff (usually with directx windows) which you can output to sprites and create some really cool effects and with little overhead in Corona.

Particle Candy is out now for Corona and it does look very interesting.

I will build it into a game which has fast moving physics, collisions, lots of transparent pngs and report back on its performance.

May be a little while though...

It doesn't seem to be available yet. Seems very soon. Uhhhh. Can't wait.