Particle effects play a central role in Infamous: Second Son, with superpowers including “smoke” and “neon.” Particle systems are authored in a powerful, text-based expression language which provides great flexibility for effect artists to create complex behavior. This language is compiled into PSSL and run on the asynchronous compute queues of the PlayStation 4 GPU. This talk will describe the particle system runtime and authoring environment, with numerous examples of how simple features can be combined to create interesting effects. We will also describe our solutions to various challenges that arose when trying to run efficiently on the highly-parallel GPU.

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Second Son Particles | GDC 2014

GDC Session: The inFAMOUS: Second Son Particle System Architecture

Speaker: Bill Rockenbeck

GDC Track / Format: Visual Arts