During QNA Casey Muratori said that hmh will look better than most games made in engines off the shelf. But the only thing it possibly will not have will be special effects.

Does he mean particle systems? That is all I found when googling for "special effects in video games". Like rendering water, sparks etc.

For reference this is the part of the Q&A https://hero.handmade.network/episode/code/day108/#5071

Casey will cover particle systems at some point (day 155).

In terms of special effects, as far as I remember it hasn't been covered in the series yet, but the engine as evolved a lot (using 3d API instead of software renderer) and there is nothing preventing the addition of special effects.

Hi Simon,

So I wanted to know what these special effects are. I am not really a gamer so I tried to google to find out what the referred special effects were in the context of videogames but I could only find tutorials about fire/water/particles etc.

It can mean a lot of things. I would say there are two types of effects:

• fullscreen effect like motion blur, film grain, vignetting, chromatic aberations, bloom... basically anything that you either apply on the complete screen or part of it near the end of the rendering because it depends on previous part of the rendering (for example while rendering you render some information like velocity of objects in a screen buffer and use it to apply an effect on the final image).
• "special effects" (sfx) I don't know if it's the proper term, but that's more what you saw with particle systems but it's not limited to that. They often use several things together. An easy example is to watch a video of recent Street Fighter games. To have a lot of impact on hits, there are particle systems (probably several at the same time), spirtes or geometry to show some "energy thingy" or area of effect, trails behind character geometry, timing pauses, background fading out for super/ultra moves...

You can have a look a this video that shows a bit how effects work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ucvynuIe-o

I see. Thanks for the link. I'll watch it tonight. And Ill google the things you mentioned as well. :)