A particle system is a collection of sprites or particles. Each particle system has an emitter from which the particles are created. A particle system also determines the behavior of the particles in the system. Hence, it can be said that a particle is the smallest entity that creates the particle system.
A very simple example of a particle system is rain. Rain is a particle system—each raindrop is a particle, and a cloud has a lot of emitters from which the droplets or particles are created.
We will create a particle system instead of just creating individual particles because with a particle system, you can create different kinds of effects using the same particle. For example, we saw Rain, which is a particle system; but what if we wanted another effect, such as water coming out of the faucet? Here, the particle is the same—a water droplet—but a rain droplet behaves differently. Here water falls from the faucet, and each drop falls with a force and is created with a single...