Slow down with particles issue

Well … sorry to bother you again Renase but I’ve stumbled across a problem again ://



Up to this point all my particle effects have been explosions. They all were set up with the following settings.


particleManager.setControlFlow(false);
particleManager.setRepeatType(Controller.RT_CLAMP);



When I needed to use an explosion I would just attach it to my scene and call particleManager.forceRespawn(). This works great. No slows downs or anything.


Just yesterday I decided to add a spark effect to the ship when it gets low on health. Unlike the explosions I need this effect to loop. I also wanted to set the particle manager to control the flow of particles so that only a few come out at a time.

I used the following settings:

particleManager.setControlFlow(true);
particleManager.setReleaseRate(5);
particleManager.setRepeatType(Controller.RT_WRAP);



With these new spark effects there is a noticeable lag before the effect starts. It almost appears as though the effect is being re-generated rather than using the one I already created on startup. The more particles I have in the spark the longer the lag.

If I change the settings to be RT_CLAMP then there is no slow down but then the sparks only go off once and stop as opposed to looping which is what I was hoping for.

Any idea what might be going on?

try and warm it up using:



particleManager.warmup(100);



That should do it. It will call update 100 times and that should solve it for ya.

DP
try and warm it up using:


I'm already doing that :(

Are you still calling forceRespawn by any chance? If the manager is already warmed up and sitting in some cache of yours, it sounds like you are calling something that is forcing a re-eval when you grab it from the cache.

hehe … you hit the nail on the head Renase.



That was exactly the problem.

Good to hear. :slight_smile: