XNA HLSL Particles

April 18th, 2013: Migrating Project to https://github.com/Cody-Duncan/XNAParticles
I will be sure to pull changes back to the repository here.

Requirements: XNA 3.1, Visual Studio 2008 (for source code), a graphics card that supports Shader Model 3.0 .

This simulates a field of particles. Physics calculations are done using HLSL with the vertex texture fetch. Each particle's velocity is stored in a pixel's rgb values in a texture. The position is stored in a separate texture. The velocity texture is run through an HLSL shader to update the velocities, and then the same sort of thing occurs for the position texture. This allows these calculations to be done on the GPU rather than CPU. The final shader pulls these values from the textures to place and render each particle.

This demo includes controls like left-click to attract particles to the mouse cursor, right-click to repel. The mouse controls are poorly mapped to the 3D environment, so expect it to be a little off.