Remove remaining particle systems

[jorrit]

All particle systems (except for 'particles') have to be removed.

[res]

Is that really a good idea for 1.0? A lot of apps & maps still use that systems. Better just deprecate them in 1.0 and remove them for the next release, giving people a chance to update their apps.

[jorrit]

I vote strongly for removing them *before* 1.0 release. First of all the old particle systems are poorly documented, sometimes very slow, and they make it more difficult for us to maintain CS. Also it makes it more confusing for the user. So many particle systems? Which to use? Also if we don't remove them people will surely use them in 1.0 which means making it harder to remove later. Also tools like b2cs will soon support particles and the partconv should also convert most existing particle systems.

[fossi]

The changelist from 0.98 to 1.0 is huge anyway, so doing one more change or one less is not gonna hurt anybody. And i agree that the current particles aren't really useful. How far along is partconv?

Otherwise this task looks easy to do, let's get it done and RC1 out the door.

[jorrit]

Easy to do? Well feel free :-) It is not at all easy I'm afraid. I started it with the conversion of explosion but it is a lot of manual work and also the documentation has to be updated for it. Still it is very important.

[fossi]

I opened up Particles porting hints for further documentation and will be giving examples for every of the old systems. Could you please port or rewrite the ones in walkdemo.cpp, Jorrit?

[fossi]

quoting a mail from jorrit:

I have converted and removed rain, snow, explo, fire, and fountain.
Only spiral and emit are left to do. Emit will be postponed until
after 1.0 (at least the removal) but I would try to convert all emits
we have to new particles anyway. Spiral should be removed before 1.0.
However I think that for new particles to fully support emit and
spiral it needs a new effector. So I think that this is a priority
before 1.0 final at least. We also need a way to prefill the particle
systems as at this moment a lot of the converted particle systems look
rather weird.

removing emit is new ticket #151 assigned to milestone 1.2

[fossi]

prefill is #152 assigned to 1.0RC2. can this be closed jorrit? or do we move it to 1.0RC2 for the spirals? i want to keep moving.

[jorrit]

Spiral is now gone.