Hi all

I have two maps, one which is a test map for models, and the other one is a test level for a game I have been working on, on and off.

On both maps - if I have particle emitters - it causes issues that cripple the game play to some extent.

The level for my game - this has 524 entities. 2 of which are smoke emitters.
There is one point about half way through the map where there are several lava decals, at this point the game play has a slow-motion effect happening, once you get past the decals everything goes back to normal.

The test map for models - this has 924 entities. 3 of which are smoke and fire emitters.
This map plays fine, but there is a pair of animated gates, which when activated, go into slow-motion - taking about 30 seconds to open or close.

In both cases just deleting the emitters fixes the issue.

While optimizing the levels would obviously play a part here, I am just wondering if the particle system is causing a slow-down in the engine.

Has anyone else seen this?

Reliquia....

Hi reliquia, I have seen this happen if you attach the emitters to triggerzones, what are you attaching them too and what settings do you have in the FPE of the host?

Can you post the scripts you are using for the particle emitters?

@GraPhix - I modeled a simple low poly disc for now. I was thinking of attaching them to more specific things like logs for fire, ash heaps for smoke etc.



@AmenMoses
Yeah, not too flash at scripting, but here ya go

Reliquia....

Do you have vsynch off?

One of the emitters is set to spawn at 1 ms rate, which seeing as the minimum life of the particles is 500ms is a wee bit excessive.

Try changing the spawn rate to something more sensible like 20 ms and make sure vsynch is on to see if that improves matters.

Also the emitters are going to be merrily spawning away even if the player is on the other side of the map, I would have the emitters created when needed, for example when the player enters a certain trigger zone or comes with a certain range, then have them deleted when no longer needed.

Added an example script showing how the number of particles an emitter can create is controlled.

Thanks AmenMoses, will take a look tomorrow, heading for shuteye now...

Reliquia....

One other word of caution, there are several reasons why doing things in the _init part of the script is not a good idea:
1) Any errors in the _init function will not get properly reported.

2) When you repeatedly test a map GG doesn't properly clean up between runs, this may mean for example that the emitters created in the first run still exist when you do the second run and the third etc.

3) Under some conditions I've found that the _init function doesn't get called, only seems to happen when there are a lot of scripted entities and they aren't 'always active'. I think this is caused by GG trying to be too clever and inhibiting too many active entities to improve performance, so only entities which are close to the player get their scripts called.

If you see performance problems in test runs the first thing to try is restart GG and see if the problem exists in a clean run.