Q and A Clearing House

Are you going to add 'soft particles' support to the renderer?

Probably not. As well as performance concerns, soft particles are a feature that depends heavily on post-processing and affects other features such as stencil shadows and multisampled anti-aliasing.

Features such as this can't be implemented in isolation. They all integrate, so an integrated approach needs to be taken to them. If I removed stencil shadows in order to support soft particles, I can guarantee you that there will be plenty of outcry.

How is this current (particle) system looking with respect to performance, by the way?

It holds up well compared to the traditional "dots" system. I can of course set up test cases where each outperforms the other ("dots" has more shader complexity in some cases, but is simpler and faster to draw in many others) and you'll likely encounter examples of this during actual gameplay.