koobas.hobune.stream
Optimising Shruiken Particle System
Hi,
Looking for some advice on optimising a particle system. My game is 2D, releasing on PC. Trying to create a dust storm that obscures the player's vision.
In a level with a storm, a prefab of this particle effect is instantiated, and the density of the storm is modified occasionally, (sometimes switched to 0) by changing the emission rate. Lowest emission rate to get a decent effect is 30, with max 60. Max particles is 400.
Read a few posts, and found that the performance was better when I turned off receive/cast shadow. Noticing a temporary performance hit just when the particles are switched on after being at 0. This seems only to happen in the build. Seems fine in the editor.
I've attached details a screen grab of the system. The texture is 128 x 128, transparent diffuse shader.
Any advice on ways to optimise particle performance?
Edit 1: Have stopped the particle emission being reduced to 0 (now keep it at 5 - 10 minimum), and this seems to reduce the severity of these performance drops. Going to mess around with changing number/size of particles and if can maintain the dust effect and improve performance. Any advice appreciated.
I will change Max Particles to, for example, 100 or 50. Texture change to 64 x 64, and start lifetime to 10 sec or higer.
Thanks. I found out that the effect was not purely as a result of the particles, I had a lightning effect too, rendering on per-pixel. Lowering the quality of the light and reducing particle numbers helped.
I'm guessing it's better to have a small number of large particles, that a large number of small ones?
