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Disappearing particles
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Nox_A15 Offline
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Post: #1
Disappearing particles
Today I encountered a problem with rendering particles during testing the map with World Editor (moving around with obj_player object). I wanted to create a quite big wall from particles. They are huge and in the distance, fly for two seconds very quickly horizontally. Problem is, when I watch the particles with the camera, moving it also horizontally, there is an angle from which they disappear and are not rendered at all. After moving camera back to previous position they appear again.

Strange thing is, everything is normal when working in the editor (not moving with obj_player). I haven't tested if everything is all right when playing in our exe.
12-27-2011 05:18 AM
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fatcoder Offline
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Post: #2
RE: Disappearing particles
Maybe the emitter is going outside the view frustum, which is culling away the entire particle system???
12-27-2011 02:55 PM
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fatcoder Offline
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Post: #3
RE: Disappearing particles
I haven't used particles much in EE yet, so I was just taking a stab. It would seem silly if the default particle system didn't use frustum culling??? You could end up with so many outside the view, being updated and rendered for no reason.
12-27-2011 11:18 PM
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Nox_A15 Offline
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Post: #4
RE: Disappearing particles
Thanks for help guys. smile I've just checked and yes, you're right - particles disappear when the source is not on the screen any longer. It still has some "buffer" though (area around the source that prevent it from disappearing too early), so with smaller particles it's probably not even possible to encounter this issue. Problem is, my particles are huge and they traverse quite a distance horizontally from the source.

Now, how to cheat the engine for it not to erase them from the screen? I've just tried to apply a huge physics to the particle object or to change the size of the object, nothing helps. I found out that particles disappear even when camera still see the object box (huge one, but still). Any suggestions?

I would love to have a choice - "those particles will be visible all the time until I say otherwise". Or maybe some LoD-like distance system would be better - they would disappear after chosen distance from the camera.
12-28-2011 08:30 PM
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