[sldev] Reviewing/Fixing the Particle System

[Nicholaz Beresford]

Argent Stonecutter wrote:
> Given that the problem builds up after teleport and region crossing, 
> is it possible that the region of the generators are not being taken 
> into account to determine when particle systems should be removed?
We'll have to see that.  I'm not at all proficient with particles, 
looking at them in sort of an outsider view.  When I can make a 1.16 
build, and given sufficient interest here, I can provide debug versions 
with logging so someone who has enough knowledge about these (and places 
to look from) can provide more details.

> I'm not sure I understand. If the emitter generates 200 particles a 
> second with a lifetime of two seconds, then after 1 second there will 
> be 200, after 2 seconds there will be 400, after 3 seconds there will 
> be 400, and there will never be more than 400. I'm not sure I 
> understand what you mean by "progressive" here.
Ouch, you're right.   I guess I shouldn't think about that kind of stuff 
after 4AM.  :-(


> 100-200 pps is not an unreasonably high emission rate.
>
> Consider the contrails on my plane: the plane can move up to 30m/s, 
> and the contrail particles are 0.5m to start with and need to be 
> overlapped to create a "continuum", so I have to generate a minimum of 
> 120 particles per second assuming *no* competition just to keep the 
> contrails looking "solid", even with no "burst" effect.
>
> I don't think the problem is that it's not aggressive enough about 
> pruning particle systems, I think the problem is that particle 
> emitters are left running for objects that are not in sight.
I understand. 

It's just I've seen literally hundreths of those in some areas and had 
zero ideas where they might be coming from.   I have an 1.15 which lists 
numbers of particles and number of sources every second in the debug log 
(shift+ctrl+4) and wherever I went, within two minutes max count (4096) 
was reached unless I was looking a very very barren areas and no visible 
clue where they might be (not like explosions, hundreths of torches, etc.)

But I guess it's best to wait with pursuing that further until I can 
make a compile to produce logs and maybe we can go to a controlled area 
and check what the brpwser gets and what's supposed to be there really.  
It might still be that the system (server) is generating multiple copies 
of the same source or something.


Nick