Created by Matthew Davey, the Mercury Particle Engine is a fantastic free open source tool that comes equipped with a graphical particle effect editor. If you are looking for a good, fast and reliable particle engine; this is an excellent choice.
Matthew Davey
Owner of the Mercury Particle Engine project - first released back in 2006 and then refined over 5 major iterations to find the perfect architecture for the particle engine.
Ian Qvist
Joined the project in 2009. Wrote documentation and restructured the project to make it appealing for game developers. Now works as a developer on extending the capabilities of the engine. Ian is also the project lead on the brilliant Farseer Physics Engine project.
Daniel Pramel
Joined the project in 2010, contributed multi-threading support and sample applications among other things.
Alexandre Beber
Created the PolygonEmitter and TextureEmitter and contributed both to the MPE project. (TextureEmitter has now been replaced by MaskEmitter, however Alexandres code is still present)
Donators
The following people have generously donated to the Mercury Particle Engine project.
Kevin Mcleod
JetBrains
Tamer Elsayed
Patrick Smacchia
Check out this excellent video tutorial by Matt Davey going over the basic steps of setting up and using Mercury Particle Engine in an XNA game project. Link: Youtu.be
To see the Mercury Particle Engine in action, check out this demo: Youtu.be
See this How to Mercury Particle Engine tutorial by Riku Koskinen: Xnacoding.blogspot.com
Check out this post by Richard Reddy on how to get Mercury Particle Engine working in XNA 4.0: Reddybrek.com