[Alan Lorence]

Did you try “run with software rendering”?

You should also check the “do not use texture RAM for bg images” option in the preferences OpenGL page.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

pIllusion uses basic OpenGL features, so you don’t need an advanced GPU, but faster is always better. If you look at game benchmarks, that’s a pretty good measure of how it will work in pIllusion.

More memory on the card is always better too: I’d suggest at least 128 MB, but 256 would be better.

I haven’t used ATI cards except in my Macs, so I can’t report on how they work (although there are some pretty basic OpenGL features that ATI OS X drivers don’t support — like drawing antialiased lines). I’ve used NVidia-based cards in all of my PCs since my original TNT.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

Ah, I understand now. Basically, you need 2 emitters. The first is the energy ball (or burst, or laser, or whatever) that moves from the thrower to the target. Then you need a 2nd emitter that does the “burst”.

Don’t try to do it with a single emitter.

I took an existing emitter (turbulent plasma) and made it into a enery ball. Then I moved it, and duplicated it. Then modified the duplicate emitter to make it “explode”. This took a little work, and you need some understanding of how these emitters work, but it mainly involved increasing the velocity for the particles (and a few other tweaks).

https://www.wondertouch.com/downloads/temp/cow/energy_burst_example.zip

This example was made in SE for Windows. There might be a problem with opening it on the Mac version — I can’t remember.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

You really need to give an example of what you mean — an image, reference to a video clip on the wondertouch website, something. I don’t know what you mean by this. I suspect what you want to do is quite easy, I just don’t understand what it is.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

Forgot to say: TV Snow is in emitters_04_09

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

There are 2 ways that I look for emitters. First, I use “Load Library” and look at the thumbnails for each library until I see the emitter I am looking for. IF that doesn’t do it, then I use the Library Manager. The Lib Manager allows you to see all of the emitters animated, without having to load one library after another.

In future versions I’ll figure out a search system.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

Ok. Are you able to save any image formats at all? If not, then you should reinstall. If TGA is the only format you can’t write, check to see if you have “lftga13n.dll” in your particleIllusion 3 folder. If not, you should probably reinstall.

You could also use the “run with software rendering” option (Start – Programs – particleILlusion 3 menu) and see if that fixes the problem. If so, you have a video driver issue and need to get updated drivers (or use older “qualified” drivers if you’re using beta drivers).

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

It depends what exactly you want the impact to look like. In the image sample from wibwobweb, it uses an “electric burst” emitter, and a different emitter for the “stream” of energy.

You can try decreasing the emission range of an emitter to limit the direction it “expands”.

Don’t know if this helped.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

If I understand what you’re asking for, you can do this with particleIllusion 3.0 (which is why people pointed you here). You don’t mention that you have pI3 though.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

What version are you using? What OS?

Does it work if you save out a single TGA file?

Try using a very simple filename such as “test.tga”.

Alan.
wondertouch