[Weapon Issue] Smoke dissapears when going close :(

[novationx]

Hi ,

Link to the weapon & Download
Screenshot of the smoke

I made an Electric Smoke grenade with the action-maker & the outcome is awesome. I tested it online with others in a custom Elite version, and altho its probably not rly usable in Elite, it was loads of fun!

The problem is that smokes dissapear when you're too close to them. They dissapear completely if you stand directly in the center of them. You could say thats 'cheating' haha and ofc it feels unnatural.


Anyways, Im pretty sure NADEO is aware of this, and its probably done on purpose to have a performance boost...
Will this be "fixed"? Or should I give up developing smoke grenades ?


btw, I <3 the action maker

[Teardrop]

This problem is linked to the size of your smoke particles. I think that you can't see particles that you cross, and if they're too big, you're gonna cross a lot of them.


Try to reduce the size of your smoke particles, and then use the "Particles count" and the "Intensity", to keep the visibility low.

[fleo]

If particles are smaller, that means we need more of them. I'm afraid we gonna have fps drop with too many particles. This smoke was ok when 2 or max 3 grenades were launched, after that it was a computer killer.

But we'll test by playing on intensity, it may work. Thanks anyway for the advice

[grasshoper]

What is the use of the smoke in this particular game? Is smoke really necessary?


_______________
legal expandable batons

[GabrielM]

Actually it's not that obvious when it comes to the ratio ParticleSize/ParticleCount in terms of performance.
The size of the particles is really performance consuming.

If you want to make smoke here's the deal :

- Particles Count / Seconds : The number of particles is not the main issue, the biggest issue you could have with it, is the fact that they are limited in the whole scene (every particles being generated in the current map as a whole). So if you have a weapon that shoots 10 bullets / seconds, with 20 000 particles generated / seconds, one guy in the map would reach the limit in one or two seconds of shooting (i don't remember precisely the limit). At that point the oldest particles would be instantly killed, disapearing with no fade out whatsoever.

- Particle Size : From what i remember, every visible particles need to be drawn by the gpu. So if i get close to a smoke, and i see 1000 particles of the size of half of my computer screen, the gpu will have to draw the equivalent of 500 * my screen resolution, which is pretty big.

- So as you see, if you have 10000 particles / seconds of a really small size, it might not give you a fps drop, but you could easily flood the particle limits, and therefore starting to have some clipping with the oldest particles.

Practical examples :

- Randomness (Size & Intensity Random) : The more you add randomness, the more you'll need generated particles in order to have something more opaque, to compensate the particles that got smaller because of the size random, and the one that got more transparent because of the intensity random. I think the Intensity random is the more critical one, because if a big particle is generated with a very low intensity, being very transparent and nearly not visible, it will still use the same performances than a very visible one.

- Intensity in itself : in that same spirit, exagerating the intensity setting make the smoke more opaque, but also less merging with the environment, especially on the edge of the sprites.

In conclusion, the most opaque smoke grenade you could do with no performance drop, would be with small/medium particle size, a good number of them per/seconds, high intensity, no size random, no intensity random...

...But it also would be the ugliest one.

As you understand it's a question of balance i'll let you find yours.

[novationx]

I gave up doing this a long time ago ( 28 jul :p ) but It's some nice info for other "weapon developers"

Also, the story about this particle limit is actually very interesting and can explain loads of the things/"bugs" I experienced when testing. Imo its really important to know this and I should have known earlier.

Maybe you could pin this info somewhere or add it to documentation on that documentation website?
" There is a maximum amount of particles that can be used at once on every server. e.g : if the limit is 20 000 particles and you're using 20 001 then the 1st particle will be killed instantly."

But use the actual limit and not a made-up value

Thank you for the feedback, mate