We are going to make our particle system in a way that mimics the Leonids particle system library at http://plattysoft.github.io/Leonids/. This project is a free software library I made to use particle systems in the standard Android UI.
A demo of the Leonids library is available on Google Play
As a result of this, Leonids implements its own update and draw threads, as well as a simplified GameView. We already have all these, so we will adapt the code to suit our needs.
The concepts we are going to work with in this chapter are:
Particle system: The entity that takes care of spawning, updating, and keeping track of the particles
Initializer: A class that sets a value for a particle based on certain parameters (before being active)
Modifier: A class that updates a value for a particle based on the elapsed time (while being active)
In our game, we will use only a few initializers and modifiers. If you need to extend the functionality...