Annoying with vanishing particles

[POLPOX 778]

Particles in Arma 3 don't show correctly - some say since version 1.62 - and I am very annoying with this problem because creating particle effects is one of my expressive style!

I posted a ticket about this with a video for a while ago but nobody noticed even BI.

 

Does anyone have same problem? Is there any way to solve?

Thank you.

 

OS: Win 10 64-bit

CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1065T

RAM: 16GB

GPU: AMD Radeon HD 7800

[LCpl C. Calautti 0]

I see everything perfectly fine, except for the dust aftermath of walking on dirt. But that might just be due to incorrect settings? 

 

OS:Win 10 64

CPU: i7-6700HQ  2.6 GHZ

GPU: Nvidia GeForce 970M

[POLPOX 778]

On 2017/3/15 at 10:10 AM, LCpl C. Calautti said:

I see everything perfectly fine, except for the dust aftermath of walking on dirt. But that might just be due to incorrect settings? 

I forgot to subscribe the topic... silly mistake.

 

Yeah I thought it was only for me but looks like there are many of players are playing with this problem.

 

Another video: 

 

[Azza FHI 50]

You are definitely not the only one with this problem. I saw it a few months ago and Im amazed it has not been fixed as there are multiple tickets about it now (mine and yours at the very least). How can people use smoke grenades effectively with this problem?

the weird thing about it is that if you zoom in with your right mouse button you can see the 'invisible' particles re-appear. So its just a bug, nothing to do with particle limit

[POLPOX 778]

3 hours ago, Azza FHI said:

the weird thing about it is that if you zoom in with your right mouse button you can see the 'invisible' particles re-appear. So its just a bug, nothing to do with particle limit

And if you change the active window (with Alt+Tab) and active the game again, the hidden particles appear again.

WTF BI? I want make custom particles like snows, sparks of fire etc. Please!

[dmarkwick 261]

I came here to open just such a thread as this :)

 

So it seems that there is some crazy PFX optimisation algorithm kicking in maybe? Here is my impression:

When some vehicles are smoking, I see very "thin" pfx for them. When I look away then look back, they are full pfx, but often most of the particles just pop out of existence again after half a second or even less.

 

Actually they're not popping out of existence - because they reappear when I look away for a while. So they are still "there", just not rendered.

 

The visual impression is NOT good. When I'm looking at some scene, I see smoke pfx popping in & out of render, often the dead vehicle is generating particles that "live" for a fraction of a second before being culled, looking terrible. Moving around the battlefield is hugely distracting when columns of smoke just disappear, or reappear.

 

It happens to all pfx it seems, I see it happening to smoke grenades too, which is definitely NOT cool. I see milky thin white smoke that covers nothing, I look away for a second, look back and the proper thick smoke is back again. After a few seconds it gradually turns milky thin again.

Maybe the AI is still affected by the non-rendered particles, maybe not, but I might imagine for MP players this is a huge problem.

 

It's affecting me personally because I'm trying to get some nice smoke effects going but I am unable to. The arbitrary nature of the render cull makes it impossible to get any kind of reliably reproducible effect.

 

For information, I have the options/video/particle quality set to high, but I've also tried in the other settings.

[dmarkwick 261]

I added a comment to the feedback ticket.

[Leyo 2]

Same here... it's a disaster.

 

i worked for weeks on immersive dust/smoke scripts last year, everything was fabulous, and now i'm back after six months... i cry. a lot.

 

gpu nvidia gtx 870 M, always worked fine no matter the settings with arma 3.

 

suscribed to the ticket and added a coment... no news on your side , guys ?

[POLPOX 778]

12 minutes ago, Leyo said:

suscribed to the ticket and added a coment... no news on your side , guys ?

Unfortunately, no. Even the latest Dev-Branch! What is going on, BI?

[POLPOX 778]

I can't believe that they created the trailer without fix this problem.

[super-truite 54]

I am having the same problems with custom config particle effects.
Tested on Windows 10 64bits with Titan X, 1070 GTX, 870M (same problem with the 3 cards).

 

[anthariel 165]

To add to the super-truite comment above, we also have this particle problem. That is, when generating a smoke trail in our case, one or more particles will not be rendered or will be removed (see picture 1).

We have try to lower the total number of particle rendered (~7500) but this doesn't solves the problem, however when we do an alt-tab to go back to the Windows desktop and then we go back into the game, it solves the problem for previously deleted particles (they reappear)(if we zoom into the missing particle, the particle will also reappear...).

 

Our second problem is that it is apparently impossible to force the engine to render more than 18,000 particles? Despite the following modification: (see picture 2 and 3 for error)

		class CfgVideoOptions
		{
			class Particles
			{
				class High;
				class Low;
				class Normal;
				class UltraTest: High
				{
					text="Ultra test";
					particlesSoftLimit=50000;
					particlesHardLimit=75000;
					smokeGenMinDist=300;
					smokeGenMaxDist=5000;
					smokeSizeCoef=2;
					smokeIntervalCoef=1;
					smokeZoomCoef=1.42857;
					highQualityShader=1;
					numFullSizeParticles=120;
				};
			};

 

 

Once the hardLimit had been reached, the next particles following the particle n°18000 will  not been rendered. (Can someone from BI can confirm that please?)

All of this was tested in dev and stable version (1.68 and 1.70).

 

 

 

pictures here : 

 

 

Edit: Tested on the "Arma3LegacyPorts"  branch (ArmA3 1.64) nothing changes.

 

 

[super-truite 54]

One other thing I noticed: the bigger the particles the stronger the problem. With huge particles you have to zoom out really far away to get the particle to render.
Is there an older Legacy branch still available (with an access code) in order to edit particles without this problem while waiting for a fix? I am doing a project which heavily

use particle effects and the problem is so strong with some effects that I cannot even guess what the final result would look like when the bug is fixed .

[dmarkwick 261]

2 hours ago, super-truite said:

One other thing I noticed: the bigger the particles the stronger the problem. With huge particles you have to zoom out really far away to get the particle to render.
Is there an older Legacy branch still available (with an access code) in order to edit particles without this problem while waiting for a fix? I am doing a project which heavily

use particle effects and the problem is so strong with some effects that I cannot even guess what the final result would look like when the bug is fixed .

 

There is another problem with larger particles which has bugged me and limited me for years (since ArmA2 at least), there is some odd movement of the particle when the view is moved around, as demonstrated by this video:

 

 

[super-truite 54]

When using config animated particles, the particles seem to disappear completely when using the splendid camera with the time cursor to zero.
Not happening with scripted animated particle effect though.

[POLPOX 778]

I forgot to mention about this, razazel claimed this problem and changed the task status to "Reviewed". So, this is a good news at last.

[Kanti Om 1]

Surprisingly enough, but 32-bit game version dosen't have this problems with particles.

[super-truite 54]

Weird, on my end it does not work with the 32 bits exe. What specs do you have ? I tested on a G750JS laptop.

[Kanti Om 1]

os: win10 x64, i7-3770. 3.4Gh, geforce gtx680, 8gb ram. Don't think it's related to my specs anyhow.

 

There is also video(not by me, but same result as for me)

 

On 64bit version life time of particle much shorter, than on 32bit version, also there is much less particles in 64bit version

 

[8LacK5naK3 192]

There`s definitely some sort of glitch going on, and I really would love to see this bug squashed. It looks bloody awful compared to the thick billowing smoke effects from pre-64 bit.

 

I`m seeing the same patchy, half-formed particles many others have shown or described in here, since the 64-bit release. If I throw a smoke grenade on the ground, and look at it, it`s patchy. If I look completely away from the scene for a second and look back, I very briefly see the full thickness, and then half of it disappears very noticeably. Same with any explosions, burning wrecks, missile trails, etc. It`s almost like half the particles are drawn when you look away, and removed when you look at them....

 

2 powerful machines here, both running A3 maxed out. I miss my nice smoke :(

[POLPOX 778]

I don't know this is a good news but we can play problem-less Arma 3 with Arma 3 Diagnostics Exe. We might use this to take some machinima.

[_leech 29]

On 7/8/2017 at 5:01 PM, POLPOX said:

I don't know this is a good news but we can play problem-less Arma 3 with Arma 3 Diagnostics Exe. We might use this to take some machinima.

The good news is that it should be possible to fix. I also have this problem.

[_leech 29]

On 29/6/2017 at 0:46 AM, Kanti Om said:

Surprisingly enough, but 32-bit game version dosen't have this problems with particles.

I also have disappearing particles in 32-bit but not as many.

 

On 30/6/2017 at 8:56 PM, Kanti Om said:

On 64bit version life time of particle much shorter, than on 32bit version, also there is much less particles in 64bit version

 

I don't understand why this is. Guess i will use 32-bit untill this get fixed.

[ruPal 143]

Up, also found that and posted in DEV branch thread:

 

[rossoe 46]

This issue has really frustrated me since 64bit came out - I noticed it a lot particularly using the more extensive effects found in 'Blastcore Edited' mod. However it's the same for me in standard game with no mods. Please have a look at this one BI, it takes so much away from the immersion of the game,