Are particle effects budgets shuffled around a lot, or are there large amounts of room for growth as VFX are developed? I remember when we were shown engine exhaust being transitioned from particle effects to shader effects.
TL;DRParticle budgets do shift, for example when moving from CPU to GPU particles, and because the number of ships nearby is unbounded, the engine needs some dynamic scaling rather than fixed budgets set at authoring time.
The budgets do change. The weird thing when working on this game is people get better quality graphics cards. So it's very much tied to the hardware that you've got. But budgets do shift around. I'll try and give a more specific example. An example of the budget changing would be if we were using CPU particles, like the old particle system that we had, we would not be able to use as many individual particles. So we'd have a low count limitation compared to using the GPU particles. So absolutely, once upon a time when we only had CPU particles, the budget was a lot, lot lower. And once we moved towards GPU, the budget was higher, because it wasn't that we were taking a portion of the budget, but the count limit was much less limited for us. So the budget does shift around. It's weird when you're making a game as big as ours as well. It's really hard. It's not finite. You can't just be given a budget from Ali Brown; he can't just go, "You can only use this portion of the budget on this very specific thing," because you've got no limitation on how many ships could be in the vicinity as well. So you might work towards a budget for an individual effect, say the Gladius maneuvering thruster. But if there's 10, 20 Gladiuses, then that budget has shifted drastically. And actually this ties in with the question about having dynamic scalability to the particle system. That's the kind of thing where we need it to be dynamic. We can't really make those decisions when we're authoring the effects. There's got to be some kind of dynamic element to the engine itself, how it's deciding what to draw and what not to draw, without killing what it looks like to the player.
For those who maybe haven't been watching the programs for as long as we've been making them, almost a decade now: when we talk about cost and budget and stuff like this, this is a resource allocation thing in the computer. Everything you ask your computer to do slows it down, just a little tick. So we always have to balance where we spend those resources. It's not a money thing.