Hope you guys are doing well! It's been a few months since I last posted anything, and I would like to update you about the things I'm working on and my vision for Pixelpart. I believe Pixelpart has the potential to be useful to many more game developers and VFX artists. Beginning with the upcoming release of Pixelpart 1.7, I aim to bring Pixelpart to a truly professional level in the context of visual effects in games. Specifically, the changes will include:

• Support for 3D meshes making it possible to use them as particles
  
• Revision of the rendering system with real-time lighting and HDR rendering
  
• New effect attribute system, which will allow you to define dynamic attributes for your effect and connect them to the basic particle attributes via visual scripting. This is particularly useful for the game engine plugins. Instead of needing to change a lot of particle properties with scripts when you want an effect to react to something in the world, the plugins will then offer a simple method to change a dynamic input, changing all necessary properties as defined in the editor!
  
• New types of force field like noise fields, vector fields and drag fields in both 2D and 3D
  
• Of course, the integration of these new features into the runtime plugins for Unity and Godot
  

A sneak peek of the work-in-progress lighting and rendering system:



The new attribute system in action. In this example, a single attribute is used to derive multiple properties of the flame:



Right now, I'm in the middle of implementing all of this and plan to be finished in around 3 months. In the meantime, a small bugfix update for Pixelpart 1.6 will be released soon. Once the update to Pixelpart 1.7 is finished, I intend to invest more time into marketing and producing learning material like tutorials and hands-on examples. Additionally, I may develop more runtime plugins, like for UE5, which has been requested quite a lot.

Thank you for supporting Pixelpart!