Particle system matrices must be 2-dimensional (n x 2, where n is the maximum number of particles), and may be composed of either float32 or float64 data types. Planes 0 and 1 are reserved and represent a unique particle ID and the current life of the particle, respectively. All other planes (from plane 2 to plane 31) may be used to manage qualities for each particle. The second row always holds the immediately previous value of row 1.
Particles are emitted at a rate determined by the emit attribute, until the maximum number of particles are active. When newborn, their life is set to a value determined by the life attribute. Each time a particle passes through jit.p.shiva, its life is decremented. When life reaches zero, the particle is destroyed, allowing for new particles to be born. For this reason, particle systems in Jitter should be constructed as feedback systems. See the help files for examples.
Jitter objects with the jit.p. prefix expect properly specified particle systems matrices, and respect the reserved plane values. Other Jitter objects of use to particle systems construction (such as jit.op) have no knowledge of the matrix format, so care should be taken when you work with them, if you intend to feed the results back into jit.p.shiva.