I’v just tracked down an issue where every time my pawn used an ability, it spawned a particle effect at a location using Spawn Emitter at location with auto-destroy to true.
This particle effect is pretty simple but it looks like it never got cleared, causing a huge build up on the transform or renderdata stat in Stat Game.
This was on a Samsung S5. The game itself is very simple and maintains 60fps pretty easily, but after about 100 spawns of the emitter is soon drops and keeps dropping everytime you spawn it.
This has happened since probably 4.8, but I’ve just tracked it down in 4.10.4
Update: It looks the issue was because the ribbon data module had loops set to 0, even though the emitter had it’s loops set to 1, so it never got destroyed.
I guess this is more of a user error issue, but it might be useful to somehow flag that to the user?
Yes, if the emitter is still looping and never becomes destroyed this could cause a serious issue. Especially on devices that your project is deployed.
If you could give some reproductions steps of how you have your pawn setup along with the steps you have taken to fix it I can look into a possible feature request. This request would provide a way of updating the user that having your module set to 0 but your emitter still set to 1 will cause issues and would you like to proceed.
I simply changed the emitter so it only has 1 loop instead of looping forever. I also changed the pawn so instead of spawning new emitters, it just re-uses the same one as it never needs more than one active.
The way my pawn was setup was simply when you tap the screen, it would fire out a grapple and where it hit would spawn this emitter.
One reason it took me longer than usual to find the problem was that the particles weren’t showing up in the scene outliner during gameplay.
A simple message in Cascade if your Ribbon emitter loops were different to it’s source emitter would definitely help.
Currently there is a new system in development that should improve upon the reports of the particle system. This system should be more intuitive and provide more of a catch net for issues such as these.
I do not currently have an ETA or time frame for when this will be implemented or if this functionality will be a part of it.
Thank you very much for reporting this issue to us. Look forward to this feature at a later major release.