Particles Petering Out?

My fireplace and candle animations are struggling to stay lit. My typically roaring fire is down to an occasional spark. Anyone else having this issue? Any suggestions?

This has been an issue with particles that have carried over from the firstlook versions of the client. I have only been able to correct this with a relog.

If your vid card can handle it, increase your max particle count. This seems to "fix" the particles enough that you can see them. I had to jump from my normal 2000 to 5000, but saw no difference in the perfermance. All of it's laggy since the update though *Shrugs*

~Jessy

From the wiki: Most clients are configured to display 4096 particles within their draw distance (default: 96 m). If the number of particles within your client's draw distance is close to the limit, you may not see your particles or only see it sporatically.

Maybe something in the vicinity is generating a lot of particles. Playing around with the draw distance should give you a hint. Then you can go check around.

Three good suggestions. Thanks all!

I have tried lowering draw distance to minimum and raising the number of particles but no effect. They start off strong and either fade over time or after teleporting a couple times to different regions. This simply did not occur before the update with the official viewer. Only the firstlook versions.

Seems that the phone weasels gnawed through your particle line and they are leaking out now.

No, seriously, in your case it really sounds like a viewer problem. But if relogging fixes the prob temporarily, this at least is a workaround of sorts.

*sets up the phone weasel traps*

I have had two reports of 1.14 users "not seeing particles"... a relog fixed one, a clean install fixed the other.

There are also a couple deprecated LSL functions that were removed from the current release - this includes llMakeFire(), llMakeExplosion and llMakeSmoke().. these functions were replaced with approximations within the newish llParticleSystem().. Check the code to see if llMakeFire() is being used. You might need to switch to a simple animated texture, or create a new script which does a little better job..

Out of curiosity: What happens to old, compiled objects which still use these functions? It is pretty obvious that you would have to change the code if you modify the script, but do they stay functional as-is?

Part of the latest update was to code some kind of mechanism that would try and translate the depreciated functions into an equivalent llParticleSystem call. I don't remember if it was server-side or client-side or how it was supposed to have worked, but LL does have a comittment to not break existing content. So they did implement something that was supposed to keep the old compiled scripts working.

However, they did also say it was best to rewrite the scripts to use the correct function. So perhaps the 'translating' function doesn't work all that well.

Personally I have not had any problem seeing particles with the new viewer but maybe I'm just lucky.

-Atashi

Seconded.

I did a bunch of particle scripting this weekend and noticed the same thing. It seems like there's a leak somewhere which, after a while, causes the number of particles to start to drop. For me, only a relog fixed the problem. AMD/nvidia 7800GT.

Does this mean my no mod products with scripts I can't change are rendered useless?

No, it just means that they may not work quite the same as they did before. The old function calls will still be supported, however on the server side, those calls are now mapped to the llParticleSys() with an approximate effect of the original functions.