Does anyone know how to use the timeline?

[CASIO F-91W]

I cannot figure out the timeline. I am trying to make like a molotov cocktail effect: First there is an explosion, then there are some fires remaining. I fugured I could use the timeline for that (have emitter 8 hidden on start, then enable it after a certain time) but that does not seem to work

How do I use the timeline, what is it for? Are there any good examples of timeline usage?

[Davit Masia]

I recommend you use "death emit" on partciles tab, in the middle columns of sliders. There is Middle/Death/Birth. So on a emiter death you can start other emitters, so no need for timelines.

Timelines is more used to change all properties of a particle at X time.

[CASIO F-91W]

Unfortunately the emit on death would not work in my example. :(
It would be really really useful if you could add a feature that would enable and disable an emitter after X amount of frames.

Let's say there is an explosion and the explosion emitters all fire at frame 200. And I want some lingering fire that remain and loop for 100 frames only. In that case I would set the looping fire emitter to trigger on frame 200 and disable on frame 300.

This feature would also be very useful for effects that have delays and rythm in them.

[Davit Masia]

The use the Delay by frames on the bottom right on particles tab ;)

[CASIO F-91W]

Perfect! That solved it for the molotov cocktail.
However I do think a good addition would be a "stop on frame" setting too.

[Davit Masia]

Great! glad to help.

What you mean about "stop on frame" ? if you want an emiter stops at X frame just set life lower than other emitters. Or what you mean? Any example?

[gleed]

When you need to orchestrate multiple emitters starting/stopping at certain times that are not exactly the same, you need to do quite a lot of unwieldy fiddling and calculations in your head with settings currently to get it to render properly.

An example for the dev: I want to render 1 burst of a parcticle system that starts with 1 burst of emitter 0 which has a particle lifetime of 100 and an arbitrary particle count, lets say just 3, and a few frames before the lifetime of e0 ends (say at t=90) I want to trigger another single burst of a different emitter whose particles have a lifetime of 120 and it spawns 60 particles once.

Just to get this to play at a basic level without overlapping emitter spawns, I need to set the first particle's emitter delay to some value that is larger than the lifetime of the entire animation sequence so it doesn't overlap with another instance of itself, and then I need to set the emitter delay of the second emitter to a value I need to calculate in my head that matches up so the lifetime of the first emitter + the emitter delay of the first emitter is when the second emitter first starts spawning particles. In my example the entire sequence will take 210 frames to animate (since the second emiter spawns at t=90 and lives for 120 frames) so I set the emitter delay of the first emitter to 250 to give a bit of buffer, then I set the emitter delay of the second emitter to 340, because delay e0 (250) + lifetime e0(100) - 10 (start 10 frames earlier) = 340.

Now don't even get me started what happens if I later on decided to introduce a third emitter into that sequence between the other two, and decided that the preivous second emitter should spawn once the newly created third one finishes.

By comparison if I did this with a timeline, I would just keep all delays at 0, and just make a second point in the timeline after the first emitter dies where I switch on the second emitter, and drag that point around, and later add a third one for the third emitter. It's orders of magnitude easier and doesn't involve any complicated fiddling around with values.

[gleed]

As a side note the emitter delay should not make the playback wait until one period of that delay passes before spawning the first wave of particles, that is what the start delay is for. That just makes it so you wait around whatever the delay of an emitter is every time you click play.

Also, I'm not sure how much money this tool made for you, but if it's unfeasible to support it in the future because it doesn't generate much income, I would seriously suggest thinking about making the source code available to purchasers. You could even put it on github with a license that allows submitting patches but no use unless you have purchased the software from itch.io or steam.

[CASIO F-91W]

I have to agree with gleed, it's technically possible to achieve certain results with PixelFXdesigner, but they requrire a lot of fiddling and experimenting. A real timeline would really help to boost the application in teerms of features and controllability. It would also unlock a proper "over time" settings where the user would be able to gain proper over-time control of particles.

This application have so much untapped potential that is just waiting to be unlocked :)