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Particle Engine Problems

David Guillaume
Registered User
Join date: 15 May 2004
Posts: 10
10-13-2004 18:44
I've been working on particle scripts lately and I've noticed they're very sensitive to particle spamming, in some ways I wouldn't have expected. There are some issues I'd like to point out and I have some suggestions.

Issues:

1. Probably the worst, any particle source within the sim you're in (and possibly even further) will affect your limit. Changing draw distance doesn't seem to matter. You can be 700m away from the other sources and they still effect what you're looking at.

2. Particle spamming is too easy. It's too easy to make an object that uses up the client's particle limit with even a single script. (As stated above, it affects at least the entire sim.)

3. People who spent the time to make their stuff less greedy will just get crappy results when someone else is using up more than the limit. For example, let’s say I've set the client to show 8192 particles. If some guy's rocket ship is trying to use 40000 and I'm trying to use 192, the result is that I see about 39 of mine and he sees about 8153 of his on average. A particle system that uses under 200 doesn't usually look too good if you cut it back by almost 80%. :(

Suggestions:

1. Please give us client-side options to ignore particles from a specific user or object.

2. Make the particle system a bit smarter about cutting out what we can't see (especially if it's like 700m away). I know this will probably be low priority, but I'd like to make sure it's at least on the to-do list.

3. When the system is full from what's in view, make it so it imposes more limit on the greedier objects before cutting down on objects that only use a few. For instance, from the example above, let's say instead of showing 8153 from the rocket and 39 from the other thing, we get 8000 and 192. (barely a change for the rocket) It would be a huge improvement for low count objects.

If any Lindens would care for a good demonstration of the issues I mentioned, please feel free to contact me in world.
Moleculor Satyr
Fireflies!
Join date: 5 Jan 2004
Posts: 2,650
10-13-2004 19:46
Hear hear!

While we're at it, can we have all those particle system requests we made a while back too?
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