To preface this post, my team’s programmer and I have been working on implementing a feature for our game that involves pseudo-emissive objects. In this case, we are trying to create a convincing effect for the collision point on the beam of an IR laser. For the sake of this thread I will be referring to that point as the “dot”.
One feature that we would really like to take advantage of is the Light Emission property of Particle Emitters. This ensures that no matter where the particle is, it will always be lit as if it is emitting light.
We’ve tried implementing this feature utilizing Particle Emitters, which presented us with a few issues regarding this method. The main issue being that the “dot” must be a constant particle and Particle Emitters are hard coded to be dynamic. ROBLOX’s wiki states that the Rate property of Particle Emitters defines the number of particles emitted per second. In theory, one could set the Rate and Lifetime of the particle to 1 and create the illusion that the particle is constant, as the particles would be removed and replaced simultaneously. Although this doesn’t seem to be the case. The particles are removed and replaced, but there is still a noticeable delay between the two actions causing flickering. Tweaking the Lifetime property to be slightly longer doesn’t help either, as we’ve observed that even with the particle lifetime set to longer values than the particle’s Rate (i.e. lifetime = 2.1, rate = 0.5), the flickering still persists yet at a less predictable and more volatile rate.
This whole flickering issue could all be avoided if the Light Emission property were to be assigned to Billboard GUI objects. To the extent of my knowledge, individual particles emitted by a Particle Emitter are handled very similarly to Billboard GUI’s on the rendering side of things. Billboard GUI’s are assigned a Light Influence property, so it would only make sense to give them a Light Emission property as well. While this isn’t a wide spread concern, i’m sure the implementation of the Light Emission property for Billboard GUI’s will aid developers in many different creative ways, as it would for me and my team in this particular example.