Muzzle flashes, stability, bugfixes

This update adds muzzle flashes, sparks, more emitter shapes, and new fire and smoke controls. It also improves preview quality, makes keyframe editing more responsive, and reduces the size of the downloads.

Beta — GPU feedback welcome. Windows and Linux builds are available. Please report your GPU and driver, whether the app starts, and whether preview and export work. Reports from Radeon 780M/7xxM users are especially helpful. Native Windows testing is still needed.

Weapon bursts and shaped emitters

A new GPU particle burst emitter adds sparks to volumetric effects. The new weapon examples include rifle and handgun muzzle flashes, a looping machine-gun flash, and a rocket backblast fireball with sparks. Bursts can repeat.

• Rotate primitive emitters and choose cylinder, capsule, cone, torus, ellipsoid, hemisphere, rounded box, rounded cylinder, rounded cone, or tube shapes.
• Adjust fire and smoke vorticity separately; use the new Smoke tab and Show smoke toggle while tuning an effect.
• Colliders block fire and smoke, particles bounce off them, and collider gizmos can be dragged in the preview.
• Flame-front shredding now tears the flame front after fixes to its units and strength.

More control over the rendered volume

Shading controls now include smoke and flame sharpening, a flame remap ramp, ambient and extinction colours, shadow density and intensity, fire-lit smoke, and a smoke colour ramp. Render-time sub-voxel Detail helps close-ups, and motion blur is available for moving effects.

A clearer, faster preview

The preview renders sharply at the panel's actual resolution and aspect ratio, without the old square crop. High quality is much faster with a precomputed shadow volume; while playing, the preview is capped to keep it responsive. Keyframe edits now re-simulate incrementally instead of freezing the editor.

Editor and reliability updates

• Undo and redo with Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y or Ctrl+Shift+Z.
• Toolbars wrap when the app is in a window.
• Diagnostic logs now live in an effect-forge folder and use the filename effect-forge.log. If the simulation detects invalid values, it turns on detailed tracing to make GPU bug reports more useful.
• A styled-emitter issue on Radeon 780M has been fixed.
• The downloads are now around 40–50 MB zipped, with development files left out.

Learn the workflow

The new online tutorial covers getting started and exporting effects.

Installing the update

Extract the new download into a fresh folder. On Windows, run effect-forge.exe and keep the DLLs beside it. On Linux, run ./install.sh to register the desktop launcher, or launch ./effect-forge.x86_64 directly.

Your own presets and exports stay where you saved them. The new app-data location starts with fresh window-layout settings; old logs and layout settings are not moved automatically.

EffectForge is still a beta and requires a Vulkan-capable GPU. GIF export requires ImageMagick; the known GIF encoder problem under Proton remains. PNG spritesheets, volume atlases, and OpenVDB exports provide the other export paths. Sprite FX remains temporarily hidden.

How to report GPU problems

1. Note your operating system, GPU, driver version, and whether startup, preview, and export work.
2. Reproduce the problem, then find effect-forge.log: on Windows, %APPDATA%\effect-forge\logs\effect-forge.log; on Linux, ~/.local/share/effect-forge/logs/effect-forge.log.
3. Follow the online tutorial's “Reporting GPU problems” section and send the log with a short account of what happened.

Download the beta · Send feedback or report a bug

Made by Delirium Forge Studio. If you make an effect with the update, I'd love to see it.