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, Windows Phone 7 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 130,000 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).
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Latest News
Hopper FreeMidi + MercuryThere is a beta version available for controlling your Mercury particle engine with MIDI. For more info, go to the documentation:
Midi Version.
Kinect SDK + MercuryView the full article on
Channel9ProgenitorExato Game Studios proudly present their first game, Progenitor. Utilizing the new 3D features of Mercury 4.0!
CommanderEphemere Games emailed to let us know they used Mercury in their game
CommandermtBARThis is probably the coolest use of Mercury yet!
EffectEditor Mystery Bug ResolvedSome users have reported problems when using the EffectEditor application where the default plugin library is not being loaded. Depending on which version you are using, you may see a "
could not find any emitter|modifier|serialization plugins!" error message, or you could find that several menu items in the front end don't appear to "do" anything. This is caused by windows security policy for files downloaded from the internet, and can be resolved by
unblocking the archive before extracting it.
Spring Up Harmony ReleaseFrozax has released Spring Up Harmony on Xbox Live Indie Games. Spring Up Harmony is a mix between pachinko and Breakout, and has some really rather nice particle effects!
Demo VideoGerbil Physics 2 ReleasePencel games have recently released Gerbil Physics 2 on Xbox Live Indie Games. Like the original game, the team at Pencel have utilized Mercury for their particle effects in the sequel.
Check out some high resolution screenshots of Gerbil Physics 2 in the
Showcase section!
First Video Tutorial availableI have recently recorded the first video tutorial for Mercury, which is a getting started guide designed to get you off the ground. More video tutorials will follow shortly covering topics such as using the effect editor & importing xml effects, integrating with existing game engines and more advanced topics such as creating custom modifiers.
I recommend launching the video in an external window and choosing the highest resolution available to facilitate reading the code