Am I wrong? (Do Particles cause collision events?)

do you have physics turned on in your particles??????

lol

What is worse, is that I understand this and it makes sense to me (even if it is /slightly/ tongue-in-cheek )

What irks me a little is that this particle thing all boils down to another case of "please change your behaviour and reduce your enjoyment because of my personal (finance|ignorance|laziness|ego)".

A general rule of thumb: Don't reply to any thread more than a week old. People have probably lost interest in whatever question they asked by that time.

ok...so everyone note...if you do not have the time to come in forums more than once a week...you may as well not post (unless you wish to post to anything at all rather than what catches your interest)....gotcha

It's true. I lost interest and am now missing all the replies to this thread.

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Oh, and the 'e' key on my keyboard seems to be broken too.

You didn't lose interest or you wouldn't have posted that *smirks* *smiles* *taunts* LOL!

Actually one valid concern is that particles cause collisions indirectly: walking avatars may not be able to see where they are going if it is too noisy. This can be annoying both to the people trying to move around and the people in the area who can actually hear sound (i.e. aren't running the Linux client like me; should I consider the inability to unmute sound an actual FEATURE? LOL).

Well there's always volume control. For sound... not particles that is.

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Today's forecast sunny but severely reduced visibility.
People with allergies be careful out there, the particle count is high.

And there is always View-->Beacons-->Hide Particles. For particles... not sound that is.

or control-shift-alt-underscore if the debug menu is on.

(or is it equals not underscore... one's clouds the other is particles, I keep getting them mixed up)

Particles cause lag in two ways, one purely client side and the other moslty client side.

1) Fully client side: particle rendering. particles are viewed only on the client and start when the avatar can 'see' the emitter so the particles won't start flowing at the same time for everyone, and the density of the particles will be based on the client's particle count setting, or hiding particles through the keyboard shortcuts hide->beacons, etc.

2) Mostly client side: The texture used. If the particle uses a texture the asset server (not the sim server) has to transfer the texture if its not already in cache, then the client has to render the texture. On large textures this can create lag and long periods of grey boxes while the video hardware tries to render all the textures in teh area, not just the particles.

Issue 1 is the one that most people think is causing server-side lag and leads to most misconceptions about particles. Issue 2 affects all objects in the game world, not just particles and is a bigger cause of client lag (and what usually pushes your bandwith and lost packet meteres to yellow and red) than anything else (scripts and listens can create the sim lag and slow down the sim performance but textures and particles affect the client isde).

Another cause of particle misconception is that many attached particles are with bling-ed objects and poofs. Most of these are also using a listen on channel 0 to turn them on and off. The listen is likely causing more lag than the particles and is the only part of it causing sim-side lag that affects everyone globally. Many AOs also do this though there are some out now that are HUD based so remove the listen for AO control.

Of course no matter how many people you tell these things to or how many times many just don't get it. To most people lag is lag and it doesn't matter if its server-side or client-side. All they know is its affecting them and its someone elses responsibility to 'cut it out' than it is their own to adjust their preferences to better support their hardware and playing enjoyment. Its like the people who constantly get booted because they want to crank their bandwith to max thinking it'll make them run better instead of making them more prone to client lag, lost packets, and disconnects.

There is another form of lag that can be created by poorly designed particle displays.

Some people want many different colored or textured particles. Since a prim can only have one particle display coming from it, they end up putting in a very short timer (if they use a timer at all) and call llParticleSystem() *MANY* times each time with a different color definition or texture or whatever.

Much like jewelry that changes color hundreds of times a second, this causes additional traffic to be sent from SecondLife to everyone near enough to see the jewelry. The above particle display is no different.

(It's better to use several prims... with different particle settings on each, than it is to constantly re-call llParticleSystem().)