SIGGRAPH: The Destiny Particle Architecture

Abstract: The world of Destiny is filled with “Space Magic”, so we expect a lot from our FX. Our particles need to convey a wide variety of visual experiences, support sub-second iteration, and achieve high performance. This presentation will discuss how we tackled these problems in Destiny 2. We’ll see that particle systems in Destiny are represented by node graphs, where each node contains parameters – such as particle size and color – represented by expressions. We’ll discuss the techniques that allow these expressions to support sub-second iteration and high performance, including our expression-to-HLSL converter and our bytecode interpreter, which can execute on both the CPU and the GPU. We’ll provide an overview of the code architecture, including the relatively simple changes we made to support GPU particles. We’ll also show one of our features, the motion primitives, as a demonstration of this architecture. These are shape primitives — such as spheres, points, and planes – used to influence the motion of a particle.

You can find the full presentation here.