Game Programming using Qt 5 Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

Particle systems

A commonly used visual effect in games is generating a large number of small, usually short-lived, often fast-moving, fuzzy objects such as stars, sparks, fumes, dust, snow, splinters, falling leaves, or the like. Placing these as regular items within a scene would greatly degrade performance. Instead, a special engine is used, which keeps a registry of such objects and tracks (simulates) their logical attributes without having physical entities in the scene. Such objects, called particles, are rendered upon request in the scene using very efficient algorithms. This allows us to use a large number of particles without having a negative impact on the rest of the scene.

Qt Quick provides a particle system in the QtQuick.Particles ...