Friday, February 15, 2008

Windlight and Particles

Yesterday I posted something on the JIRA about particles not displaying properly in the current relase of the First Look: Windlight viewer. Basically I'm not seeing enough particles no matter what my max particle count is. In the below snapshot there is a comparison of the same effect in Windlight and on the Release Candidate viewer. My issue was a duplicate (oops--there wasn't one that I could see dealing with that problem when I checked, but apparently I'm not good at using Jira) but I attached the snapshot to the original issue.





That brings me to another point I wanted to mention. Second Life currently has a little bit of a problem keeping particle textures in memory or whatever and ready to be displayed on the effect. This makes short particle effects start off as grey rectangles before the particle texture loads and can be quite annoying for trying to make a short particle effect look nice because even after the texture is loaded once it might need to load again the next time it's used. There is a workaround for this for creators: the particle texture should be put onto a prim. For example, for my chain lightning staff I am working on I put a tiny cube inside the staff. The cube has all the particle textures I'm using and even though it's hidden by the rest of the staff the texture still loads and the particle effect never has any problem with showing grey blobs instead of lightning.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I use the Ninja HUD, and it's kind of annoying that the dust-on-landing effect uses particle textures at all. You have to fall twice before anyone sees you as landing in anything but swirilng brown rectangles. :-)

I love the HUD, just nitpick with the dust. That's me: Arguing with dust.

--Solo Mornington

The Yohkoh Legacy said...

I knew I forgot something in the last update. I'll include this in a minor update within the next week or so.