Maybe I Can Live With Gradle...

I was reading a a tutorial about particle emitters yesterday during a search for how to get the effect of snow falling in the foreground.  I'm not quite done yet, and it's going to be a few days after that before I integrate an appropriately novice-friendly particle system into liblol.  But I had to write about this anyway, because I think I'm starting to become a Gradle convert.

To run the tutorial, you need the libgdx particle editor.  It's a standard libgdx tool, if you added it to your project.  Of course, liblol didn't have it, because I didn't see the need previously.

Back in the eclipse days, to get this to work, I'd have to download some new binaries (.jar files or .so files or both), put them in the appropriate folders, and push all that mess into the repository.  Not so with Gradle.  All I had to do was add one line to the dependencies of the desktop project section of the top-level build.gradle file.

 compile "com.badlogicgames.gdx:gdx-tools:$gdxVersion"

That's it.  Next time I opened Android Studio, it went and found all the binaries I needed.  Wow.

Aside: if your Android Studio is set up like mine was, then when "1: Project" is expanded (left side of screen), you'll have "Android" beside it.  You need to change that to "Project" or "Package" in order to find the ParticleEditor tool.  Here's a screenshot (before and after):