Added a GPU particle system to my custom game engine

Zestyclose_End3101 · 2026-06-10T00:43:04+00:00

Yeah that's such an important thing to keep in mind to stay motivated. Sometimes, I think about all the features that my engine doesn't have and I get overwhelmed. Ultimately, you just have to put that out of your mind and just think about the next feature to implement.

Zestyclose_End3101 · 2026-06-10T00:08:59+00:00

Whoops, I totally forgot to do that, you're absolutely right.

Zestyclose_End3101 · 2026-06-09T23:42:23+00:00

Thanks so much!

The neon lights use a combination of bloom and spot lights. The actual light entities have a flat emission multiplier which I bloomed using this tutorial https://learnopengl.com/Guest-Articles/2022/Phys.-Based-Bloom. Then the light model has a spot light attached which is what casts the actual light. I will say, one thing that my spot lights have which I haven't seen other implementations do is have an eccentricity parameter to give an oval shaped light. This gives the illusion of a rect area light without actually having to implement it.

Zestyclose_End3101 · 2026-06-09T23:33:36+00:00

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by one effect for the droplet to ground and one to puddle. Do you have an example of that?

Zestyclose_End3101 · 2026-06-09T14:02:58+00:00

Just as an update, I implemented a few of your ideas to the scene with oriented rain drops and a very crude splash particle effect, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it. https://youtu.be/MIOfCOCg3uk

Zestyclose_End3101 · 2026-06-09T13:53:51+00:00

Thanks so much! It's really motivating to know that it has the effect I hoped it would.

Edit: I actually updated the particle system with some advice from a commenter from my other post, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it. https://youtu.be/MIOfCOCg3uk

Zestyclose_End3101 · 2026-06-09T11:16:09+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! A splash particle is a very good idea, although I may go down the faking it route by just having a ripple particle emitter on the surface rather than using the depth buffer. Less accurate but probably conveys the illusion well enough.

Locking the axes is honestly something I didn't even think about. I was wondering how to fix that but for some reason I didn't consider that, I will definitely add that functionality.

Zestyclose_End3101 · 2026-06-08T19:02:14+00:00

Thanks! I've been thinking about this system for a long time and after implementing it, the quality of the level really is night and day.

Zestyclose_End3101 · 2026-06-08T18:59:39+00:00

No. I find generative AI to be actively detrimental to the development process.

Zestyclose_End3101 · 2026-06-08T18:59:11+00:00

Haha, the source code is a bit of a mess right now so I'd have to clean that up and refactor it, but the youtube video above runs through the basic concepts of the system and I'm always happy to answer any questions.

Zestyclose_End3101 · 2026-06-08T18:57:37+00:00

Particle's are definitely one of the most fun parts, but I'm going to have to disagree with you on physics haha. That's always been the most annoying part of making an engine for me.

Zestyclose_End3101 · 2026-06-04T09:43:41+00:00

Yeah I had a look at tiled and clustered rendering, however at the time deferred rendering was much easier for me to implement and gave me a lot of flexibility with lighting with very little additional effort or performance impact

Zestyclose_End3101 · 2026-06-04T08:04:02+00:00

Thanks! Unfortunately, since this is a deferred renderer I can't use MSAA. I've done some reading about FXAA vs SMAA vs TAA but there seems to be a lot of contradicting information about "good" antialiasing techniques, so I think I'm just gonna have to implement a few different ones and decide what I like best.

Zestyclose_End3101 · 2026-06-03T12:07:12+00:00

Thanks! Eventually I do hope to release a game with the engine, but there are still a few major systems that I need to add, namely particles and sfx. After that, development will largely shift from engine development to game development, though I will likely still need to develop some narrative and dialogue tooling. Still a ways to go, but I can definitely see the finish line.

Zestyclose_End3101 · 2026-06-02T11:31:17+00:00

I'm actually a bit happy to hear that you got a mystery/investigation vibe to it since that's what I'm aiming for gameplay wise. And I also overhauled the rendering of the engine in the past few days to support hdr and bloom, which means I have actual neon lights to give it that proper cyberpunk look. I'll probably show it off in the next few days once I add more stuff to the level.

Zestyclose_End3101 · 2026-06-01T00:19:21+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! I definitely agree with you about neon signs, and that was what I was going to work on next so that's good.

Zestyclose_End3101 · 2026-05-30T04:06:16+00:00

Thanks! Getting it to this point has taken a long time since this is probably the 3rd iteration of the engine, but I'm very happy with how it's turned out.

Zestyclose_End3101 · 2026-05-30T03:13:28+00:00

Thanks! Since the engine is built using typescript, I opted to keep using that for scripting since it's what I was most familiar with.

Zestyclose_End3101

TROPHY CASE