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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 3.1
Version 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 Islands
Available 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.

Latest Source Code Additions

 mpe Source Control Rss Feed News Feed 
Thursday, November 05, 2009  |  From mpe Source Control Rss Feed

Added OpacityInterpolator modifier.

Saturday, September 12, 2009  |  From mpe Source Control Rss Feed

Modifiers now appear grouped by category in the editor.

Saturday, September 12, 2009  |  From mpe Source Control Rss Feed

Fixed bug in design time support for ScaleMergeModifier

Saturday, September 12, 2009  |  From mpe Source Control Rss Feed

Added ScaleMergeModifier.

 mpe Source Control Rss Feed News Feed 


Latest Reviews

 mpe Reviews Rss Feed News Feed 
Friday, October 16, 2009  |  From mpe Reviews Rss Feed

Rated 5 Stars (out of 5) - Easy to learn and easy to use.

Friday, September 11, 2009  |  From mpe Reviews Rss Feed

Rated 5 Stars (out of 5) - The effects possibility are huge and amazing. Notwithstanding the rendering speed is fast and didn't influence even a little my project. Lastly, It works perfectly for this notebook's Intel(R) 945GM which was not designed for graphics processing, going smooth. Congratulations!

Friday, September 11, 2009  |  From mpe Reviews Rss Feed

Rated 5 Stars (out of 5) - This is exactly what I was looking for! Maybe you can also update the Editor in future ;)

Friday, June 26, 2009  |  From mpe Reviews Rss Feed

Rated 5 Stars (out of 5) - Gets you up and running quickly.

 mpe Reviews Rss Feed News Feed 
Last edited Aug 25 at 10:11 AM by JimJams, version 47

 

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