Anyone know how the LBP effects system does the fluid sims for fire and smoke? Clearly they have regular particles for flames and such, but then you’ll see fire and smoke sims do a curl that is maintained enough that makes me think it’s a small volume sim in low resolution.
This isn’t fact, but I heard once they are dynamic 2D fluids with great shaders. Makes sense, as LBP acts mostly in a 2D plane.
The cake FX in LBP2 are some of my favourites ever, although they might have been a different system (I’d guess a framebuffer of 2D particles - which nowadays, googles’ liquidfun would be great at - to feel like metaballs)
Edit: this presentation mentions LBP’s method and is from around the time:
http://www.insomniacgames.com/gdc12-jim-van-verth-fluids-techniques/
Further edit: slide 56 in this:
http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2011/Evans,%20Kirczenow%20-%20Voxels%20in%20LBP2%20(Siggraph%202011%20Advances%20in%20Real-Time%20Rendering%20Course).pdf
The whole thing is crazy interesting too
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Thanks Alex! All I was finding was crappy levels full of flickering particles. 
As someone who made loads of levels (and particles) for LBP/LBP2/LBPK and was actually hired for 1 (!!) whole week to work on LBPV I kept forwarding this to UE4 devs like I WANT THAT NAOW!
I occasionally also send it to coder/shader buddies 
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