Less particles since update ?

Anyone else seeing far fewer particles now ?

I've got the same particle count in the client as I've always had but since the update I'm seeing far fewer, like many times fewer!

At first I thought it was the sim but it doesn't seem to matter where I am.

Increasing or reducing Max Particle Count doesn't make it better either.

And they're not hidden either !

Just going to be lazy and copy/paste my reply to another similar post.

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Hey there, actually been researching this pretty extensively myself over the last month or so - particle effects that appeared gapless at 1024 max count pre(few)patches appear weakened even at 8192 count now.

The best I've been able to timeline this is around the same time they implemented small particles not rendering unless at a close distance; though I'm not 100% positive about this.

I have contacted several Lindens over some time, the dev team all claims to have not touched anything regarding the render count at any time; however most people I've mentioned it to inworld have definitely noticed a gimped particle render count.

Anyway, bring it up to them; maybe eventually something will get done.

At first, I thought this was the case, too, as I was seeing massive dropouts, even in my low-particle-count emitters. However, it turns out that one of my fellow builders had put up a build that included a very spammy set of emitters (my estimation is that they were pumping out 4-5k particles total). The problem was that her build was several hundred meters below mine, and even though it was far outside my current view/draw range, the particle system was "timesharing" my emitters with hers. Once I could get hers turned off, all fo mine returned to normal.

It seems to be a matter of particle starvation, so I would recommend looking around the sim you are working in for spammy emitters first. Chances are, someone has at least one very cool-looking fireplace (or similar) nearby that is pumping out several thousand particles.

I wish they would give priority for particle allocations to low-particle count emitters (I have a targeting reticle that uses 1 particle per second, and it hardly works at all when starvation is occurring), and let the spammy ones suffer. There's hardly any reason to pump out excessive amounts of particles to make something look good. In most cases, proper particle texture design, along with tweaking the settings, you can get something which looks as good with far less particles being used.

Since particles are client-side, what I would wish is that the client would ignore particles that do not need to be rendered. It seems like a particle system has to be outside my draw range before it stops timesharing with the system next to me, even if I'm inside an opaque box and my client has no possibility of rendering the faraway particles.

Particles had seemed to be improving over several updates--becoming more reliable over time. But in Sept, I discovered that particles in my waterfalls had suddenly gotten much worse in my sky park in Dowden.

But I didn't investigate the cause. I just took it as the final sign that it was time for me to get out.

Aye, I can agree with that, but the problem is that now, it still timeshares particles even FAR outside your draw range. That's what I was seeing in the case I described. My draw limit was 128, and her build was several hundred meters away from me.

The Particle System has a LOT of bugs (like when is fade-in alpha going to work?) and inefficiencies, and I hope they get around to addressing it at some point, but NOT BEFORE they fix what is broken first.