Five years ago, we wrote about how the visual effects in Returnal came to life, including the real-time voxeliser that dissolved Phrike into volumetric fog. If you haven’t read it, that post is a good companion to this one.
This is how that story continues.
With Saros, we didn’t just extend what we’d built for Returnal. We stepped back, looked at thirty years of accumulated engine development, and rebuilt it as a unified framework: Graphite.
What we had, and why we changed it
Our proprietary particle engine, NGP (Next-Gen Particles), started as a prototype for Resogun in 2013 and grew with every game since, all the way to Returnal. By SAROS, NGP was mature, but it was also a product of twelve years of incremental decisions, each one made in the context of a specific, isolated game.
Then something else changed: us. Joining PlayStation Studios meant delivering experiences at the level our players expect, and our tools, and the names we’d given them, no longer matched the studio we were becoming.
Enter Graphite. It brings GPU simulation, rendering, tooling, and DCC integration under one architecture, built directly for PlayStation hardware. NGP didn’t disappear, it became part of Graphite, evolved and more capable than ever.
Every Housemarque game has a visual identity players recognise immediately. Graphite is what makes that possible.
And what it actually does, frame by frame, is best explained by the incredible people who built it:
Housemarque Graphics Architect Sharman Jagadeesan and Senior Graphics Programmer Konsta Toivanen will walk you through the volumetric fog in Saros: how it evolved from Returnal, and the two systems we built to make Carcosa’s atmosphere feel alive.
Risto Jankkila (VFX Architect) will explain how we extended Graphite with data from Houdini, including a full breakdown of the player spawn sequence.
Volumetric fog
Fog