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

Throughout the months I noticed that if you used Emit() in a location not within your screen then later see that location, the particles would all spawn at once. I ended up just removing my dust emitter from bullet hole entirely for the sake of my game performance. That wasn’t too much of an issue, but about 2 days ago I started to get a problem we used to have at the start of the year that prevented me from advertising my game. When there’s just a little bit more particles it seems to not show any more particles/beams. It delays them or just not shows them at all. If you watch my video after I throw a few molotovs and shoot my gun the bullet beams will stop showing. Once the molotovs run out the beams for my bullet visuals come back. The muzzle flash also doesn’t go away instantly after I stop firing. It’s also a beam. My game has been running for 10months now and it has never had that issue since the beginning of the year when the new particle system was implemented. It’s crucial that players in my game are able to see where their bullets are shooting. I hope this can be fixed soon because it’s effecting the game’s playability.

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This has been happening for the last three to four days on our game. Particles are an integral feature and our player count has visibly been negatively impacted by this bug. Please get this fixed soon.
If you need good examples of particles stopping working @JaapSuter go look on our game: AFR: Testing - Roblox

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This has been constantly happening to us in the last few days.

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Same issue is happening to us, particles are fine in our game but beams sometimes do not render at all.

I know that other games are also reporting that particles completely break in theirs so it seems super random.

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It’s because Roblox released the Particle Flipbooks beta.

For some reason, they don’t test their stuff before publishing it, because it’s been bugged for over a year.

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I just checked bug reports to see if anyone else was having this issue and im really glad (in a way) that I saw this post. I thought it was my games network being bad or something.

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Someone needs to make a bug report about this.

is this not the bug report?----

I mean a new one, this was made in december 2021.

Oh, then yeah def someone should make one.

We’re investigating this issue. Would you have a place file we could use for reproducing it please?

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I’ve created a minimal repro for this issue to expedite the fix:
ParticlesMinRepro.rbxl (39.3 KB)

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Press Play and wait for “Particles Emitted” to print to the output
  2. Wait 3 more seconds and turn the camera 180 degrees to observe the particles emitting once the emitter’s source is in view of the camera, compare the particle’s maximum lifetime to the amount of time waited before turning the camera to observe the particles
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This repro includes @Awes_3’s repro glitch as well as the beam glitch:
Beam and Particle Engine bug Repro.rbxl (37.5 KB)

Reproduction Steps:
[For Beams]

  1. Shoot constantly until beams stop showing up
  2. Wait a few seconds and they will all randomly start reappearing

[For Particles]

  1. Look away at the constant particle emitter, wait a few seconds
  2. Look back at the emitter and during the time you weren’t looking every particle that was supposed
    to be created will all create at once

Clip of repro

Please note:
Something very important that I found was that the beams bug is very specific to my setup.
The glitch only happens when I have particle emitters within the bullet hole part. The particle emitters were originally for a dust effect. As I mentioned in my earlier post because of particles bug, the particle emitters were disabled. It’s been 10 months since those particles were disabled and just now it started to create these issues with the beams. While I can fix my issue in my game by removing those disabled dust particles from the bullet hole, I don’t think that was an intended function. It would also be nice if I could have my bullet hole dust emitters back in action.

Additional question:
And since disabled particles seems to affect the game in some way as if they were still running but invisible. Would you happen to know if they cause lag or have garbage collecting issues? I’ve been battling some memory leak issues in the game that cause the memory to eventually keep going up and most of it is seen under “Untracked memory” so it’s very hard to figure out the problem.

EDIT NOTE: I tried removing the particles from the bullet hole and my main game and it still has the issue. It seems to work in the repro but not in my main game. There might be a little more to it than I thought.

image

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We’ve sent a fix for the particle + beam visibility issue.

The particle accumulation bug is a different one, so it’s not fixed yet. I’ll follow-up on and get back to you on this one :slightly_smiling_face:.

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That’s great news! For the immediate moment the beams bug is the most important fix. And I almost forgot about flipbooks, but they’re finally here!!!

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I’m having a similar issue to this where I have around >3000 trails and they all stop rendering/flicker, even after I reduce the number back to where it used to be stable <2000 they just flicker in and out (not fully sure if they do flicker in and out when in the stable zone but it does look like it)

Not just a studio bug cause I checked in game and its even worse, 0 trails showing up not even flickering

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I’m getting massive frame drops with particles and depth of field. Like that combination just lowers me to 10 FPS. Was testing just in studio by enabling and disabling a depth of field instance and it just instantly lowered everytime on a place with nothing but a bunch of particle emmiters.

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Particles specifically, still cause massive frame rate drops now. Whereas they used to not.

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While part of the particles/beams bug was fixed about half a year ago. The second part still exists to this day. I was recently trying to make more things with particles but kept running into issues. Particles aren’t despawning on time causing lag. The part that still exists is the #2 in my previous post
“Look back at the emitter and during the time you weren’t looking every particle that was supposed
to be created will all create at once”
It can still be reproduced in that old repro file I provided if you scroll up from this just a little.

This issue has been fixed as well.