Dev blog: Special Effects in Shadowrun

Joe Waters, Graphics and Effect Developer at FASA Studio, has posted some juicy info over at the FASA dev blog at IGN.com.

Enter “Shadowrun’s” High Capacity Particle System or HCPS – we pronounce it “hiccups.” After identifying a need to include simple environment effects in levels (steam, smoke plumes, etc) with almost no CPU usage, HCPS was designed on paper before E3 2006…HCPS is designed as the ideological counterpoint to PixelStorm: where PixelStorm is extremely flexible at the cost of performance, HCPS does one or two things, but does them very well. In the case of HCPS, we wanted to cover the common case usage of PixelStorm – that is, camera-facing particles or “sprites” with very simple movement and no environment interaction – and make displaying them use almost no CPU time.

And he goes on

HCPS is optimized for one thing: rendering lots of sprites to the screen very fast. As such, it has a number of significant limitations:

HCPS only renders camera-facing “point sprites” – that is, it doesn’t render odd aspect ratios (long rectangles) or fully modeled objects.

HCPS uses simple pixel shaders – to keep performance high, HCPS doesn’t handle multi-pass rendering and instead uses the point sprite functionality built into modern graphics chipsets.

HCPS particles use simple physics – particles follow the classic parametric equation that freshman physics students learn, but they have no concept of drag, angular motion, or environment collisions.

Fascinating read. Go check it out.