Problems with particles and the particle editor

Questions
1

I have problems with particle editor.

  • Particle editor and also atlas animations in editor consume lots of cpu power.
    How you all manage to work with? It uses %80-%90 of the cpu and it is almost impossible to work.
    My setup: MacBook Air, 2 GHz Intel Core i7, 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB
    It is a known issue I know, but it not a minor problem for me.

29
29599×398 39.1 KB

  • Particles are not always playing.

This can be my fault. I’ll be glad if anyone can help…
I’m generating 4 game object from a factory which contains particles just for testing. But It never play those 4 particles. Sometimes 0 sometimes 1 sometimes 3… But all particles are receiving “EMITTER_STATE_POSTSPAWN”
Particle effect looks fine on editor. My test project is attached below.

particle-test.zip (616.5 KB)

for i = 1, 4 do
 self.random_position = vmath.vector3( math.random( 150,500), math.random( 150,1000), 1)
 self.particle_object = factory.create("/factory#dirt_factory", self.random_position)
 self.particle_url = msg.url(self.particle_object)
 self.particle_url.fragment = "dirt"
 particlefx.play(self.particle_url, emitter_state_change)
end

My particle settings:

particles
particles386×1692 24.9 KB

2

Since you have emitter type “Sphere” the particles are emitted in 3D space. I’m guessing most particles end up outside your frustum near/far plane and are therefore not rendered. Try changing the emitter type to circle if you want to emit in 2D space instead, or check your render script and modify your near/far values to allow for you particles to render.

6 Likes
3

This is embarrassing for me :slight_smile: you are absolutely right. Thank you. I thought I choose the circle. It would be nice to have a different representation for 3D space emitters. Circle → Sphere, 2D Cone → Cone are looks the same.

5 Likes
4

Yeah, I think there is an issue somewhere about that (on parental leave so I can’t verify).

2 Likes
5

We are planning to use particle editor a lot. But it is very cpu expensive and almost impossible to work with. There is an old issue on Github and it is marked as ‘minor’. Honestly I believe it can’t be a minor issue. If you are going to use Particle Fx then this is totally a blocker.

Do you have any plans to release a fix? Or do you have any other suggestions for creating particles like using 3th party tools?

6

We’re doing profiling of various aspects of the editor. @markus.gustavsson has recently looked into project load of large projects. Markus, maybe we could take a quick look at the particle effects editor next sprint to see if there are any quickwins ?

2 Likes
7

Yes, we will continue to work on performance aspects this sprint too so we will definitively investigate.

4 Likes