- Home /
Shuriken Particles Max Numbers
I am designing a particle heavy PC game and would like to know:
Is there a max number of particles that can be displayed at any one time in a scene?
Is there a max number of particle collision at any one time in a scene?
Or is it a matter of the processing power of the PC it is being played on? I have searched but can't seem to find any hard numbers.
Thanks!
Answer by Julien-Lynge · Nov 29, 2013 at 06:28 PM
If there is a max number of particles / collisions, it is higher than what I can display on my fairly powerful work machine. The limitation is CPU processing, and in my experience starts to affect framerate at around 100k-150k particles, but depending heavily on what you're doing with them. Keep in mind that Shuriken is internally multi-threaded, so results may vary.
If you want to get into the millions of particles, you have to use GPU particles with DirectX11 shaders. There's a commercial package called TC Particles that does it - we've played around with it for a couple million dynamic particles.
Exactly what I needed to know Julien, thanks! I am trying to put together my own load testing / monitoring script and see what numbers I come up with. If I get repeatable findings I'll post them here to add to yours.
By the way is it just me or is there no way to find out when a particle has been spawned?
Edit: Initial tests seem to indicate that I can only detect 1 collision per particle system per frame. Is that right?
Yeah, check out this page in the docs:
Specifically:
"The Collider receives at most one message per particle system that collided with it in any given frame even when the particle system struck the Collider with multiple particles in the current frame. In order to retrieve detailed information about all the collisions caused by the ParticleSystem ParticleSystem.GetCollisionEvents must be used to retrieve the array of ParticleSystem.CollisionEvent."