Riftrunner Peek of the Week #8

The eighth installment of RPGVault's "Peek of the Week" feature for the upcoming Divine Divinity sequel is now available. This time, Larian's Yann Popo talks about implementing particle effects in the upcoming RPG. An excerpt:
The particles engine allows you to draw particles in a defined position, to assign a trajectory or a movement, a speed, an acceleration, a rotation and so on... In Riftrunner, this engine is rather powerful and it enables us to create a large variety of different effects. But as soon as we speak generically, we expose ourselves to the problem of the explosion of parameters numbers, and it is sometimes difficult to find good values that will make the effect successful.

To obtain a good magic spell, we will bind the various visual effects. Let's take the example of Fireball. First of all, we attach a pre-casting animation to the spellcaster, showing him collecting magic energy. Then, we create the fireball on his hands, and assign a trajectory and a speed. Finally, when particles collide with an object or an NPC, we trigger an effect showing the impact.