Slick Forums

Hi again.
I realized recently, that I have a bottle neck in my game while creating new objects with particle systems. Since those objects are shots, there may very easy be hundreds of them created each second. But loading a particle system from XML (using ParticleIO.loadConfiguredSystem()) takes 5-15ms. So basically I need some very fast way how to duplicate a particle system. I discovered a duplicate() method on the system, but surprisingly it only does a serialization, saves the system to xml and then reloads it. So it is not faster at all.
Am I missing something ? Is there some better approach to this problematic ? It seems to me that I have a bad approach and I'm missing something obvious. Maybe I'm using the particle system in a wrong way... ?
I need to create a lot of object on fly and a particle system for each of them.
Is there someone who solved this issue somehow ?

Use ConfigurableEmitters. Their duplicate method works on the object without serializing it to XML.

Why do you need so many ParticleSystems?

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Right Angle Games | Marte Engine
Back to the past | Star Cleaner | SpiderTrap

I use ConfigurableEmitters, but I checked and their duplicate method is similar to the one on system. Again - save to XML and then reload.
Also what's the purpose of the particle system, if I can use only emitters ? I have a system with several emitters in one XML file, so I would like to duplicate the whole system, not only emitters.


Well as I said - for each shot (missile, for example) I'd like to have a particle system. Let's say a ship can fire 20 missiles, then I need 20 particle systems at once. All based on the same template. Does that make sense ?

So there is no effective solution ?

Rewrite the particle system. Eg use a sane XML API (streaming), use internal cloning (eg copy constructors), split data into mutable and immutable state and copy only the mutable data - maybe add a differentiation between initial state and live data etc.

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TWL - The Themable Widget Library

You could also open an RFE and see if the dev team deals with it

But it seems there is currently no out-of-the-box solution. Sorry.

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Right Angle Games | Marte Engine
Back to the past | Star Cleaner | SpiderTrap

well i also had these problems so the solution is to load all your stuff in a resource manager and pre-cache your emmitters

a related post to this you can find here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4420

at the end this was the solution:

ok perfect, so now i've tweaked the particlesystem "system" to my own needs, i preload the particles and refer from the system to my images "in memory" so i don't have the resourceloader to load them each time (because i need to use a lot of single effects) so the particles go up in memory, are released with the images and after a gc i'm on my initial state (lets say it starts at 20 > goes up to 70 mb and goes back down to 20 mb) which is perfect !
and my byte[] doesn't go berzerk

thank you guys !

so finally i use a stripped version of the particlesystem that load their particles from the config class which has them in memory, also the parsed xml documens so i can refer back to them if i need to re-create a system, otherwise you could use the duplicate method but then you should concider to do a deep copy of your particle system with all objects related to them but i prefer to create a clean system each time then resetting it

result, the byte array is very small + everything is garbage collected afterwards, now it runs in 50 mb of memory at 340 frames on the highest load

again tx for your support to give me a lead where to search!

cheerz