You can write your topic however you want, but you need to answer these questions:
What do you want to achieve? Keep it simple and clear!
I want to find a more performant alternative to spawn lots of smoke particles during gameplay.
What is the issue? Include screenshots / videos if possible!
Im developing a napoleonic era RTS game. The thing is, during gameplay a lot of smoke particles appear (units firing), and it will definitely lag overtime. I disabled transparency and lowered image resolution already, but I would like to achieve more than that.
What solutions have you tried so far? Did you look for solutions on the Developer Hub?
As i said, I already disabled transparency and lowered image resolution. Have not found any other way to improve the performance of the particles, or an alternative.
Thats pretty much it. I need to find an alternative to a lot of smoke particle emitters, or at least a way to improve their performance. Thanks for the help.
What’s a rough guesstimate of the number of Particles you are talking about?
Could you maybe change your Particle images to have more than just a single smoke image? Like having 5 puffs of smoke in a single image.
Changing the Orientation Property of the ParticleEmitter to something like -180, 180 would allow it to look a bit better so that every single puff looked identical.
How long is the duration of each Particle? Shorter times can allow more Particles as well.
Lots, lots of them. My game is supposed to handle more than 900 units at once and during a gameplay of 8vs8 at least 40 of them are fighting in a place, emitting a lot of smoke particles. (Remember we are talking about a napoleonic RTS game, every unit is 2 lines of 12 soldiers), though there is only one smoke emitter for each one.
And the supposed max game capacity is around 60 players (30vs30). so yeah, a lot of smoke particles, thats why I need to find a way to optimize that.
Have not tried your suggestion tho, ill try it later
I wonder if Particles are run on the client or the server?
Even if it is client sided that’s going to be a awful lot of strain on a device.
What about using something like Fog and/or Blur in the client’s lighting? If the fighting was intense I’m guessing a person wouldn’t be able to see that far.
Or maybe different ParticleEmitters with different Particles for items in the distance so they could run with less Particles.