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Did the old particle engine have a bug?

by Tim Scheiman · in Torque Game Builder · 07/19/2006 (4:40 pm) · 4 replies

Here's the story... I'm using Alpha 2. Yeah I know... We're so close to DONE that I don't want to go through redoing all of everything that would be required (including engine changes) in order to get the project up and running in a current version.

I'm experiencing some madness in the particle engine, wherein I'll have a nice little effect going... It'll start out with it's normal plodding couple of particles popping out here and there... and go on like that for a while. Then all of a sudden after some number of minutes it'll start cranking 'em out like I set the base quantity to a million. I think on both of the effects that I've witnessed this I've got the initial quantity set to something HIGH... for a burst, and then after like 0.1 time it is set to ZERO, so there should be no more.

So the question is -- is there anything obvious that I could be doing wrong that would cause it to loop inside of that initial 0.1 timeframe infinitely after some random number of minutes? (2 to 15... about)... Was there a bug in the particle system itself that was fixed in later releases? (If this latter was the case can someone point me in the direction of the person who fixed it?)

Thanks in advance and I PROMISE after the next few weeks you'll never hear another Alpha 2 question from me... ;)
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Associate Melv May
#1
08/13/2006 (5:04 am)
Tim,

First, sorry for the late reply. Now I've seen a similar problem first hand in Puzzle Poker when I was across the ocean looking at it before release. Kevin mentioned he was seeing this effect after several minutes. I've actually got the effect file from "Puzzle Poker" but I've never been able to reproduce the effect and I'm not sure what Kevin did in the end.

I've certainly not fixed this issue, at least not directly but someone else may have. A quick look through the subversion logs doesn't show anything.

Sorry I can't be more helpful.

- Melv.

Associate Kevin Ryan
Top Meadow Inc.
#2
08/13/2006 (11:13 am)
Like Melv said, I had the exact same problem. I had a poker chip explosion effect that lasted for just a second at most on the results screen between levels. If I left the results screen up for 10 minutes or so then the effect would start up again - only this time with an explosion of millions of poker chips. It happened once when I was at the GG offices and Melv was working at the computer next to me. "Hey Melv, take a look at this."

In my case it turned out that I wasn't setting up everything correctly. I solved it by adding the following line to my script right after my %sparkle.playEffect() call:

%sparkle.setEffectLifeMode("KILL",1);

Torque 3D Owner Tim Scheiman
Ghost Ship Studios
#3
08/16/2006 (7:21 pm)
Thank you both for the replies... I had long since given up on this thread! THAT is precisely the one that I was running into, and I will test your fix, Kevin, as soon as I get a chance and get back to you about how it worked out. Thank you thank you thank you.

Thank you.

-Tim

Torque 3D Owner Tim Scheiman
Ghost Ship Studios
#4
09/01/2006 (4:41 pm)
Well I haven't seen that particular issue since I added this bit... Though I rarely saw it before... I'll keep my fingers crossed on this one -- thanks again.

-T