Question by VesuvianPrime · Apr 02, 2014 at 11:43 AM · particlesystem shuriken

ParticleSystem GetParticles returns 0

Hi guys

I'm writing a PointCloud component using Unity's Shuriken particle system.

I'm getting some pretty decent results so far, but there is one issue that is still causing me problems: calling GetParticles immediately after SetParticles seems to always return 0.

 Debug.Log("Setting particles: " + particles.Length.ToString());
 
 this.particleSystem.maxParticles = particles.Length;
 this.particleSystem.SetParticles(particles, particles.Length);
 
 ParticleSystem.Particle[] resulting =
     new ParticleSystem.Particle[particles.Length];
 Debug.Log("Resulting particles: " + this.particleSystem.GetParticles(resulting));

The above code will print logs such as:

alt text

Debugging the length of the resulting array will print the same count of 0.

Can anyone explain to me why this is?

I presume ParticleSystem is designed to build the particles on the next render call or something like that, but I'd expect at least some kind of internal cache to get returned.

Thanks, Ves

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VesuvianPrime · Apr 02, 2014 at 12:40 PM 0

I've been able to workaround the issue by emitting one particle before setting particles:

 this.particleSystem.maxParticles = particles.Length;
 if (particles.Length > 0)
     this.particleSystem.Emit(1);
 this.particleSystem.SetParticles(particles, particles.Length);

Seems to be working fine for now, but I'd still like to know why this is necessary.