skript-particle

skript-particle Skript addon for creating complex particle effects with minimal hassle.

Requires Skript 2.7+, Java 17, Paper 1.17.1+

Download at the releases page.

You can find help, give suggestions, or voice complaints in the Issues tab here, or on the skript-chat discord here.

Skript-Particle is intended to provide syntax for creating complex shapes with particles. Competent and powerful particle syntaxes exist in addons like SkBee, but creating shapes requires a lot more effort and know-how. They're also inherently slower and less performant than Java, even without considering the usual need to re-calculate the shape each time it's drawn.

The goal for Skript-Particle is to provide easy-to-use, flexible, and powerful syntax to create particle shapes. The basic structure is a set of various shapes, like circles, lines, polygons, and more. These shapes are relative to a center point and aren't positioned anywhere specific. The drawing syntax takes a set of shapes and a location and draws all the shapes relative to that location. This allows the definition of a bunch of shapes that only need to be defined once and can then be drawn in many places and in many rotations. Since shapes can be rotated as a group, it's also very simple to change the rotation and orientation of your shapes with a single line.

Syntax is available on skUnity and SkriptHub.

Here's some example code:

command /magic:
    trigger:
        set {_shapes::outer-circle} to a circle of radius 2.225
        set {_shapes::inner-circle} to a circle of radius 2
        set {_shapes::tiny-circle} to a circle of radius 0.875

        set {_shapes::triangle-1} to a triangle with radius 2
        set {_shapes::triangle-2} to a triangle with radius 2
        rotate shapes {_shapes::triangle-2} around y axis by 60 degrees

        set particle of {_shapes::*} to electric spark

        loop 200 times:
            set {_view} to vector from yaw player's yaw and pitch player's pitch
            set {_yaw} to yaw of {_view}
#             figure out the rotation needed to rotate the shape
            set {_rotation} to rotation from vector(0, 1, 0) to {_view}
            draw the shapes {_shapes::*} at player's eye location ~ {_view}:
#                 only happens for this draw call, the original shape is not modified
#                 note that this is called once for each shape, hence `drawn shape` and not `drawn shapes`
                rotate shape drawn shape by {_rotation}
#                 the shape takes the shortest path to rotate to the desired rotation, but that causes it to appear to rotate as we turn.
#                 so we'll correct for it by rotating the shape around the y axis by the yaw of the player
                rotate shape drawn shape around relative y axis by -1 * {_yaw}

            wait 1 tick

Current Features:

• Shapes:

• Circles, Ellipses, Spheres, and Ellipsoids

• Cylinders and Elliptical Cylinders

• Arcs and Spherical Caps

• Helices

• Lines

• 2D Regular and Irregular Polygons and Prisms

• Regular polyhedra

• Rectangles and cuboids

• Drawing:

• Three styles: outline, surface, and filled. Some shapes only support one or two of these styles.

• Rotation to any orientation.

• Scaling and offsetting.

• Drawing multiple shapes at once.

• Options for who sees the particles (player specific)

• Custom particle data and density per shape

• Full support for SkBee's particle data syntaxes

• Debug axes for clear visualization of the orientation of your shape.

• Shapes are only calculated when they actually change, so you can draw the same shape many times without any performance hit.

• Option to make all calculation and drawing synchronous (async by default)

• Ability to continuously draw a shape for a timespan (async only)

• Dynamic locations, so particles can follow an entity with no additional user effort

• Particles:

• Expression for custom particles

• Section for custom particles

• Custom motion for particles (vector, inwards/outwards, [anti]clockwise)

Planned Features:

• Shapes:

• Bezier Curves

• Custom shapes defined by a function or structure

• "Common but difficult to code" shapes

• Drawing:

• Combining shapes into a custom shape to be drawn as a single shape.

• Gradient colour fields, with custom colour nodes.

• Animation:

• Ability to stretch out drawing a shape over a timespan

• Set up a pre-made animation in a custom structure, play back with one draw call