Mercury Particle Engine is a multi-platform API which allows developers to add rich visual effects to their games. Implemented in C# and targeting the Microsoft XNA Framework, it is fully compatible with Windows and Xbox 360.
Mercury is in its element when it comes to adding the little graphical flares that make your game appear professional and polished. Whether it's billowing smoke trails, intense fire effects, sparkling stars and sparks, or swirling magic spells, Mercury makes it easy to add the final visual touches to your game, allowing you to ship on time and to a high visual standard.
Mercury has been designed with two main objectives - ease of use coupled with blistering speed. The API is well thought out and easy to get to grips with, however this ease of use does not come at the cost of speed. Mercury is easily able to update and render up to 80,000 particles on a mid-range windows PC (Xbox 360 benchmarks pending). Also included is an intuitive Windows editor application, which makes visually designing particle effects a breeze! A fully featured content pipeline allows particle effects designed in the editor to be imported into your game with surprisingly little effort.
The project is available under an extremely permissive open-source license (MS-PL).
Latest News
Gearing Up For Mercury 3.1Version 3.1 of Mercury Particle Engine is now very close to general release. Among the
many new features introduced in version 3.1 are an enhanced editor application, multi-threading support, content pipeline support on Xbox, many speed improvements, and a host of new modifiers.
You can be notified when version 3.1 is released by subscribing to the
RSS feed, or you can download the latest development build by visiting the
Source Code tab.
Horn Swaggle IslandsAvailable now on XBox Live Indie Games,
Horn Swaggle Islands is a fine example of strategy puzzle gaming. The visual effects in the game are powered by Mercury Particle Engine.
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