Generating Particles

Scripting Issues
1

I’m currently experimenting with the particle system, and in particular attempting to find an alternative to spawning multiple ParticleEffects based on the same particle description file.

At the moment, my main question is this: Is there a way to force the generation of particles?

I see “induceLabor” in ParticleSystem, but if I read that correctly it doesn’t seem that it would allow me to force more than a single generation per frame.

On the other hand, my attempts to figure out how particles are generated have thus far yielded little fruit: BaseParticleFactory’s “allocParticle” and “populateParticle” look promising, but the former doesn’t seem to exist according to my error messages, I believe, and even if it did I don’t know what to do with the resulting particle.

2

bump

Is there no way to do this? :confused:

3

I don’t understand your question, what exactly you need? What you mean by “force the generation of particles”?

4

Essentially, I want to be able to have a system emit particles on command, rather than based on its own internal timer. Additionally, I want to be able to do so more than once in a given frame (albeit not necessarily on every frame).

5

Aha. Uderstand. Not sure that you can do this directly without rewriting some parts of the particle system. For my needs, I used following hack:
On creating:

        pfx.start()
        pfx.softStop()

When I need to emit some particles

    Sequence(
             Func(pfx.softStart),
             Wait(0.1),
             Func(pfx.softStop),
             ).start()

Wait(X) should be > than Bith rate
softStop allow you to avoid destroying already emitted particles and not allow to emit new particles.
To emit more than one particle at once you can simply edit the Litter Size value

6

Thank you for that. :slight_smile:

Hmm… But, if I understand that correctly, it still wouldn’t allow me to do that more than once in a single update, such as if I wanted to emit in two different places at the same time using the same system…

Ah well, it looks as though the built-in particle system may not be suited to what I’m attempting, then. I’ll likely put this particular issue aside for now and return to it at a later point in development…

Thank you again for your input. :slight_smile: