In this tutorial I will introduce to you the Stardust Particle Engine. First I’m going to show you how to set up Stardust, and then I’ll cover the basic Stardust class responsibilities and how they collaborate together to make Stardust work as a whole.

Next, we will look at a Stardust’s general workflow and get down to creating a particle effect with stars shooting out from the mouse cursor; the stars will slow down gradually, grow larger after birth, and shrink when dying.

Finally, I’ll demonstrate the flexibility of Stardust by creating several variations from the already complete example, including using animated movie clips as particles, variable particle simulation timescale, and shooting out display objects of different classes from a single emitter.

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Stardust Particle Engine provides two major approaches to freely manipulate particle motion, namely gravitational fields and deflectors. Gravitational fields are vector fields that affect a particle’s acceleration, and deflectors manipulate both a particle’s position and velocity.

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