Individual particles and physics in Sprite Kit

Question

I am a long time user of Stackoverflow but first post.

My question is seemingly simple, is there a way to make particles from an emitter interact with the physics sprites in the scene? (For example, if I am using a particle for rain, and I want it to bounce or bumpy off a sprite of a man with an umbrella. There must be a way, but I don't see a lot of documentation on adding physics to individual particles. Any ideas?

Thanks!

Answer 1

No. There is no way to make SpriteKit's built in particles interact with physics bodies. Every particle property you can control is a property of SKEmitterNode, and it has no properties for setting physics behavior for particles.

The fact is that particles are designed to be very light-weight so that you can have thousands of them on any hardware supported by SpriteKit. Physics simulation is not light-weight.

Answer 2

There is LiquidFun, which is a Box2D extension that simulate the physics of a particle system. This engine is the basis for Apple Spritekit physics engine and you can use it in your game but you have to tweek it a little bit to make it run. There are a lot of tutorials of how to use it in an ios project. I am confident that Apple will have more features added to Spritekit in the future that make the particle system respond to physics.

Answer 3

You could use a SKField to simulate gravity and then another field on your umbrella to repulse it.