Take a look at the images page – I’ve added a screenshot of the first particle system I’ve rendered in Ogre.
It seems like it’s taken a long time to get particle systems going, but I’ve actually spent a lot of time ensuring that the particle system engine is highly customisable. This effort has definitely paid off (emitters and affectors can be written by plugin DLL writers and added into the particle manager to create new effects) and I’m quite pleased with it, it was worth the extra time.
I’ll be working on a number of emitters and affectors this week to give Ogre a nice selection of special effects out of the box; to demonstrate how external developers might work with it all these effects are in a plugin dll rather than the main Ogre engine. Other than that I have a bit of optimisation to do yet too.
Those of you with CVS can start playing with particles now if you like, take a look at the example in EnvMap where I’ve shoehorned in a particle system to test it (I’ll create a separate demo for particles eventually). A snapshot will follow (for CVS-phobes) later on.