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
Source code repository change completed
The migration from SVN to Mercurial has been completed. The repository has been reset as part of this migration and is currently empty. We will take this opportunity to restructure the source code and build process, and will re-commit the latest source code
along with legacy versions over the next week.
The future of Mercury Particle Engine
Hi everyone, I would like to share my intentions for the future of this project - as the last 18 months has seen very little progress and many people will understandably be thinking that the project is dead. The project is far from dead, however it has grown
in size and complexity to the point where it became impossible for one man to maintain (despite fantastic contributions from some dedicated users). Since the founding of this project way back in 2006 the open source landscape has changed dramatically, and
the way that open source teams collaborate has changed utterly. To ensure continued development and improvement of this project, and to keep up with the latest trends in open source, Mercury will be going through a transitional period...
- The source code repository format will change from Subversion to Mercurial. Microsoft has plans to update Codeplex to better reflect the way open source projects are managed on sites such as Bitbucket and Github. For now this Codeplex site will still be
the projects home, however I am considering a move to Bitbucket depending on how Codeplex evolves over the next few months (this evolution is already under way).
- I will personally be concentrating on moving forward with the 2D core of the engine, and not getting involved in other aspects such as 3D or Windows Phone support. I will be encouraging contributors to maintain forks of the project which cater to these
requirements, and will endeavour to support these contributors as much as possible with their forks.
- Mercury will be going cross platform. Given the somewhat hazy future of XNA, particularly on Windows 8, Mercury will become a framework agnostic engine with extensions for many popular platforms such as XNA, MonoGame, SlimDX, SharpDX, Mogre, OpenTK, Tau
etc. The goal is that Mercury will be a viable option for any game which is written in C#.
As part of this process I have asked the administrators at Codeplex to convert the source code repository to Mercurial. Unfortunately they have advised me that doing so may erase the revision history, therefore I would like to warn users that the source code
repository may effectively disappear within the next two weeks. If you would like to keep the current repository I strongly suggest doing a complete checkout and making a backup of it as soon as possible.
If anyone would like to be involved in the future of the project, or would like to own a specialised fork, please contact me via Codeplex :)
Windows Phone 7 Tutorial
Andrea @ RoundCrisis has put together a comprehensive tutorial for using Mercury on a Windows Phone project. Check out the tutorial >here<
Midi + Mercury
There is a beta version available for controlling your Mercury particle engine with MIDI. For more info, go to the documentation:
Midi Version.
Kinect SDK + Mercury
View the full article on
Channel9
Click here to view the video.
mtBAR
This is probably the coolest use of Mercury yet!
Click here to view the video.
Spring Up Harmony Release
Frozax 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!
Click here to view the video.
Demo Video
Click here to view the video.
Gerbil Physics 2 Release
Pencel 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.
Click here to view the video.
Check out some high resolution screenshots of Gerbil Physics 2 in the
Showcase section!
First Video Tutorial available
I 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.
Click here to view the video.
I recommend launching the video in an external window and choosing the highest resolution available to facilitate reading the code