To solve this, I restructured the particle system to be more modular. Most of the system had to be redesigned. I changed it to use inheritance so that one particle system could contain multiple emitters of different types, like ribbons and regular particles.

I also improved the base emitter settings to support more falloffs and allow values to use curves instead of just fixed values. This made the system more flexible and easier to work with for VFX.

Implementing ribbon particles was more challenging than regular particles, since there was limited information available on how to build them.

One important difference is that a vertex is not just a position. Instead, the ribbon is built from segments between vertices, where each segment forms part of the ribbon. A width value is then used to define the size of the ribbon.

One of the main features the level designers requested was a timeline node, so I implemented one using Unreal’s timeline as reference. Since it is a latent node, it caused some issues with threading like running threads when shutdown, but I got it working in the end.

Because the timeline node required editing of curve values, it also required an editor. The curve editor I had from the particle system was too specialized, so I created a more general ImGui curve widget for scripting that uses the same flow as ImGui with begin/end.

To make it easier to control when scripts should run and update, I also implemented a script graph manager. This made it so one place registers data types in the type manager, and one place to control execution, this prevented begin events from running early and it also made it easier to trigger specific events.