Do particle scripts spontaneously change?

I'm by no means a scripter but I manage with things like the beginner's particle script, etc. I spent a couple of hours hammering out an effect to look like water for some fountain jets and they looked good. When I went back to the garden another day they looked really bad. Instead of making a nice watery stream of particles they are plooping out just one or two and it looks really lame. I opened one and edited the script to increase the number of particles and it looks fine again. I don't have a separate copy of the script as I used it so I don't recall all the exact settings so see if they've really changed. Conversely, could something to do with sim performance or a setting in my viewer (which I didn't change either) account for this? I'm embarrassed to think others may see them looking so lousy

If you turned down particle count or general graphics preference it could do that... scripts don't generally change unless they are scripted to =P

Every so often I encounter a frustrating phenomenon where I edit a script, save it, come back later, and all my changes have mysteriously vanished. It's common to have a script not save, with the accompanying error message, but when it doesn't save and gives no error, that is downright insidious.

I have some particle scripts that are unpredictable when they work and when they don't. I believe there is a JIRA out about this very problem. Sometimes they do stop working or slow down the number of particles being emitted. I have even seen a big difference in the number being emitted between one sim and the next.

to add to this, if someone else has a high density particle emitter in the same area, it will fight for # of particles reducing the amount yours shows

Thanks for all the feedback. I went in and edited a couple of the jets so they looked right and then logged off when I got a phone call. When I logged back in ALL the jets looked like they were supposed to and the two I had edited were making way too many particles! I re-edited those to be like the rest and even as I was standing there they all slowed down to the lame plooping rate

Oh, wait! I just remembered. one of my neighbors has some snow emitters running right now. Could that be it? Dag, I'll bet it is. Maybe she'll just have them up through the holiday season.

Maybe I'll look into an animated texture effect on a tortured prim if the particle approach to water isn't going to be reliable.

Thanks again for your input.

Unfortunately, particles are indeed often unreliable. Other people's poorly designed spam can easily eat away at the limit to which most clients are set for particles.

The snow could easily be it ^_^

I normally keep my particles around 4096 or so, and I've had it tweak out on me when there's a lot of snow, some particle flame, and anything else... gets annoying when you can't count the individual ones to see =P

But I'll bet that was it, just your neighbour sucking up your particles. To avoid that, mute the emitters and it should be fixed

I could do that, I suppose. I'm conceiving of this garden as a public space, though so I'll need to take into consideration that what others see depends on their settings, right? An interesting design challenge. It's fun learning new things.

Indeed ^_^

What I normally do is use a small number of slower particles, which allows for a solid stream without hundreds upon hundreds of particles. With the right particle texturing and such you can make it look just as good as faster ^_^

But yep, everything always depends on peoples' settings, which can be a problem, but... generally aim for the middle ground. There are people with high end, and people with low end, but the majority will be able to see at least the middle ground settings