Metal Particles in SpriteKit

Is it possible to add particles made and rendered using Metal in a game using SpriteKit? Is the integration straightforward? Or would it just be better to use the particle system in SpriteKit?

I haven’t done it myself, but I don’t see why not.

But the SpriteKit particle system is excellent and works well with SpriteKit, and that’s the way I’d go.

Would the following kind of particles be achievable using SpriteKit?

Also, if I did go the Metal route, are there any resources on combining the two frameworks? (I know there’s a chapter in the RW Metal book, but, after working through it, I’m still unsure whether the same method can be used for particles.)

No, SpriteKit can move emitters on touch, and you can experiment with how they look in the SpriteKit Particle editor. However, to have fine-grained control of each particle, I think you’d have to do that with Metal particles and a compute shader.

I haven’t done much work combining SpriteKit scenes with Metal, except for the fairly static overlay that you have in the Metal book, but I think you’d have to use SKRenderer to be able to do that, and, sadly, since Xcode 11 was released, I can’t currently get SKRenderer to work on Catalina, but it ought to work.

If you have any success with this, I’d be grateful if you could report back here :smiley: