As a developer on roblox I would like to request a feature for particles that beams have.
Would it be possible for you guys to give particles a facecam property to particles like they have with beams
so particles don’t always have to face the camera.
Also acceleration should also be able to work based on object space rather than just world space.
This would be extremely useful for many different situations and prevent particle visual effects from looking bad which 98% of the time they do look bad due to them always rotating to face your camera.
This would improve my game with cars that have particle systems, and visual effects for all 64 games that we will have in total. This would also help many other developers who struggle using particles due to the lack of this feature.
Err, particles are meant to be 3D. I doubt anyone would need 2D particles that are viewable only from one direction. You could always make your own system that releases decals as particles. This wouldn’t be useful enough to become a feature request in my opinion.
Can you elaborate on this? Feature requests are more likely to be considered when they have a lot of valid use cases.
I just gave 1 usage for it out of 1million applications.
Kinda hard for me to elaborate the valid use cases for it since there are at-least a million applications for it.
I guess one example for it would be this.
Try to recreate this in roblox. You can’t the reason for this is because particles will just rotate sideways to face the camera. Hopefully this helps show what I mean. Also we do not mean to make it 3d simply just make it not follow your camera around or at-least add a option for that. This is what would happen if you tried to replicate the top image with particles. unless you are facing the side of the emitter your particles will show sideways because it is facing the direction your camera is in.
For something like this, you would want to use trails wouldnt you?
My coder also posted this which I hope helps lol.
“like if it were to always face the camera
i’d be nice to be able to restrict the axis’ it moves on
because more linear textures like line slook weird”
can’t use trails on a particle spark system for a car. plus that would look horrible.
I’ve had no problem replicating this effect with trails using a simple gradient texture and roblox physics.
Mhmm but your not using the system that I said I was using so trails will not work as stated. You can’t make trails have a random spray like particles. Trails are to thin “yes you can widen them but that can cause issues”. Plus I am using like 8 different particle systems for the car switching to a 1 direction flat trail would ruin all of that. Then there is the fact that your trails are stationary not moving like ours are.
It would not be that hard for roblox to add a option to allow particles to not face the camera since beams and trails already have this option.
That’s sideways and will not work.
This is what im going for. But as stated particles just go sidways unless you view it from a side angle.
Not sure if it’s been mentioned anywhere, but I imagine it could work like this:
Particle could have lockable axes around which they would rotate.
For example, on this image, ParticleEmitter’s locked axis is Y. Particles would rotate only around the Y axis, and would not face the camera anymore. The drawn green arrow indicates Particle emission direction, so if the ParticleEmitter would have custom Acceleration and would change it’s course, the particle would align to that course respectively with it’s Y axis.
I would expect this property to have 3 booleans: X, Y, Z.
It would allow for sparks and other cool effects with just one ParticleEmitter.
Edit: Rain would be another great example as a use case.
Actually that would be the better method of doing it.
I can quickly address the acceleration with respect to object space – we already have that. If you use LockedToPart, then acceleration is relative to the part. This might not be fully what you’re looking for, and if it isn’t, let me know the use case.
As for unlocking the particle quads to have arbitrary rotation… I don’t know how possible this would be. First of all, this means that we’ll have to render twice as many quads (for the reverse side of the particle) and also add in even more properties for rotation in a three dimensional space (as opposed to two dimensional, as it currently is). The alternative methods recommended in this thread are, I think, better choices. What you want is not what ParticleEmitters are designed to be.
LockedToPart is honestly useless for what we are doing and I have already tried every other method and the only one that would work but lags the crap out of the game is using parts. Particles could work although as you said it would need twice as many quads most likely. But I kinda just gave up on trying to do stuff with particles at this point due to how limited roblox is with the resources it currently has since and the optimizations which create serious lag problems. Something this optimized would be amazing since it works on 10 year old computers with no fps drop https://twitter.com/twitter/statuses/991662910677151746 But roblox can’t produce things like this since it needs to work on all platforms.