Is there a way to get sprite particles to have an orientation rather than constantly facing the camera. I can obviously use geomParticles, but I think sprite particles are faster. Is that correct? Also, geomParticles don’t have some of the nifty features that sprite particles do like random sizes, etc. Any way I can get the random size?
A sprite, by definition, always faces the camera. It’s computed in 2-d coordinates to achieve this.
If you want to have a particle renderer that generates polygons in 3-d coordinates, that rotate it 3-d coordinates, you may have to write a custom particle renderer for this. Or, you can use a GeomParticleRenderer. You’re right, the GeomParticleRenderer will be slower, because each particle will be in its own node, and will therefore be sent to the card as a separate batch (though we are working on a low-level Panda optimization that may allieviate this in the future).
I don’t know why the GeomParticleRenderer doesn’t support scaling. It certainly could. Would you like to add this feature?
David