Particles, beams, and trails all disappearing, not disappearing when supposed to, and causing performance issues

Reproduction Steps
1.) Create a lot particles with relatively high emission rate(above 50).
2.) Set the Orientation to VelocityParallel(could be any orientation but this is for sure happening with this orientation).
3.)Disable the particle emitter without moving your camera. Sometimes it will go away, but sometimes the particles will NOT go away until you move your camera.
4.)Also is happening with trails, they will either not show up at all when creating them, or they will not disappear when disabling the trail unless you move your camera at a certain angle.
5.) I am using shadow map lighting

Here is a gif of this happening. The particles here have already been disabled:
https://gyazo.com/5b11a83d79805b9af4824779816abc8b

Here is an example of trails not showing up: https://gyazo.com/c56466aee3efa4294ca4da740ee93d64
Here is what it is supposed to look like comparing it to above: https://gyazo.com/356b27edeae4f9a23de0d57f4b575f8d
Expected Behavior
I expect the particle emitters to stop emitting particles and remove them when calling :Clear() but this is not happening.
I also expect trails to stop emitting when Enabled is set to false.

This may be a camera or lighting issue because we are experiencing frame drops just from camera movement in-game where we were not before-hand

Actual Behavior
Particles, trails, and beams are all behaving oddly. They will not turn off sometimes at seemingly random camera angles, and only until you have panned your camera a bit do they disappear even though the emitter/trail has been turned off.
This issue varies from player to player, not everyone witness the same thing. The camera definitely has some effect.
This is also causing some performance issues as particles are not cleaning up properly.
This issue gets seemingly worse the longer the game goes on (as more particles and trails are made)

Workaround
UPDATE ON THIS IT SEEMS THAT HAVING 30+ HUMANOIDS WITH MULTIPLE PARTICLES ON THEM(not enabled) IN THE GAME IS CAUSING THIS TO HAPPEN. Roblox must have made a change this week that effects rendering and humanoids or having too many particle emitters in the workspace?

Issue Area: Engine
Issue Type: Display
Impact: Very High
Frequency: Often
Date First Experienced: 2021-12-09 19:12:00 (-06:00)
Date Last Experienced: 2021-12-10 00:12:00 (-06:00)

57 Likes

What is the lag like in the game and is it affecting each players gameplay differently?

I’ve had some of the same issues with beams and trails lately but I haven’t tested particles, heck it’s so bad that I’ve literally deleted beams and they’ve stayed rendered. However, it only occurs for me when I have an atmosphere in the lighting so I’m curious if it’s the same issue for you.

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No I do not currently have atmosphere in the lighting.

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Weird, I’ll test out your reproduction steps then. I might be experiencing an entirely different issue but I highly suspect they’re related because of the similar behavior and it hasn’t been an issue until recent.

2 Likes

So after doing some testing I’m even more confused, turns out I didn’t need an atmosphere for my issues to occur so it isn’t the source. Curiously enough though I wasn’t able to replicate your problems on older experiences of mine but it worked on newer…? Same with my issues, I wonder if it has to do with a recent update somehow I mean the timeline would match up.

Ya I started experiencing it yesterday in my test place.
I jump into the main game which I haven’t updated in over a week and it was still occurring which makes me believe it has to do with lighting settings because I didn’t change the lighting settings from the main game.

2 Likes

You need to add a repro file for these issues. Last two gifs are not clear on the issue at all for someone not familiar with your experience.

Particles/beams/trails updates tend to be throttled when you have many of them in a scene.

3 Likes

I’m having a huge problem with this at the moment too. Started happening after Roblox updated on Wednesday(?) and is driving me crazy. I haven’t yet narrowed down the repro steps for it yet.

I even deleted a Beam from the game and it still was rendering on-screen.

8 Likes

Ran into this issue as well. I ran into this issue I believe around 12/08/21 (MM/DD/YY). It seems to only happen when particles / beams are in seemingly random and obscure positions / angles on your screen.

Not sure how to 100% replicate it step by step, but if you move your camera around to random positions / angles you’ll probably run into it.

I’ve also noticed that particles will seemingly emit even seconds after their lifetime if you re-angle/position your camera to a position where particles / beams will enable again.

2 Likes

I’ve been experiencing this issue since around the time when they pushed the Wednesday update and it’s been driving me insane. I have a small game and it annoys me so much. Especially when it emits a particle like 20 seconds after I emit the particle.

2 Likes

For anyone experiencing this issue I’ve narrowed it down to having a lot of particle emitter objects in the workspace. It doesn’t matter if they’re turned on or not just having a lot of them in the workspace. The work around right now is to clean up the emitters as soon as possible.

2 Likes

I’ve also been experiencing this issue, glad to know I’m not alone! In my cases, I have a few “bot battle” places that have a lot (60-100) of npc’s using guns (all have humanoids, not sure if this is relevant). After about a minute or so, all ParticleEmitters seem to have delayed emission, some seem to just not emit at all (this may be caused by the parent object being destroyed before it gets a chance, however that’s at least a 4 second delay). Many of the beam and trail objects used fail to render as well, or again render “late” and event stay on screen after they’re supposed to be deleted. I’ve tried all the different lighting modes and all seem to still have this issue. I have noticed that the glitches/bugs are lessened if i stare away from the rest of the map, limiting the number of particles/beams being rendered on the screen at once. I never had these issues a week ago though.

Edit: I’d be happy to provide further details if needed!

1 Like

Happening in some of my games too, particles acting really unreliably in game even if they’re emitting in studio.

3 Likes

This has been disastrous for me as well and I really hope this can get fixed soon. It’s not even just the rendering, sometimes particles will break and just never disappear even though they’re scripted to disable.

  1. https://gyazo.com/54d267f64340740e719b0ae7982c9927.mp4
    Example of this bug happening.
  2. https://gyazo.com/83ace16167d4a5b1273aa9f4e1ba87ac.mp4
    Expected behavior.

same this has been happening for like a week so

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We really do need a Fix or a Workaround on this as soon as possible, the impact on the games is extremly high if stuff like this doesn’t properly work anymore.

2 Likes

Happening on my end as well. Particles, Beams often appear when they should’ve been gone. It’s really distracting and I’m sure it is also affecting performance as well.

Hope this gets fixed asap. Really affecting my game.

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This has also became a big problem for my game too. All particle effects and beams are sometimes not rendering or don’t stop rendering. It’s been driving me crazy and there is no apparent fix to it.

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I’m investigating this right now.

21 Likes