Although I'm new to Gamestudio I thought questions regarding particle effects would be better answered here. What is the largest number of particles allowed by Gamestudio and what is the largest number that any of you were able to squeeze out of the A5 engine. I need on the order of several million particles traveling independently. I'm willing to put money into the hardware if the game engine is capable.

My second question is regarding the search function for the forums. Since when have they been disabled? Weren't they working fine a few months ago?

WDL manual p124 (default 2000, can be set much higher).
"Several Millions"? This is either an exaggeration, or you need some serious hardware. We can only display ~2 million pixels at our highest resolution.

Search has been dead for sometime now. We are taking drastic measures over the weekend to bring it back to life. So, next week it may work or the world as we know it may come to an end. Wish us luck.

WISHING YOU MUCH LUCK!!!

always,

Just out of curiosity, why do you need several million particles traveling independently?

I've seen just about every particle effect that I would ever need done in real-time with far fewer than that, but you may have an effect in mind that just never occurred to me.

-Joe Hocking
www.3darteest.com

Well, I should probably clarify why I need so many particles. This is not for a game, but rather a simulation of debris dispersion after a collision. I will need to know at any given time where these several million particles are located in space and be able to show this dispersion from different angles (probably not slower than 1 frame per second). I do realize that it will not be possible to show each particle as a pixel, but rather a pixel per clump of particles. Nevertheless I will need to calculate the positions of the particles and be able to display as many as I can from a chosen angle. So, what is the maximum number of independent particles that can be displayed and updated by Gamestudio? Thanks for the previous replies.

Does 2 million qualify as "millions"?
Doing a simple test level, no optimization, I have been able to display 2 000 000 bitmap particles to the screen. The results are slow (about 4 seconds per frame), but the test machine was only a GeForce2 with 32MB so the engine had to use lots of virtual memory.

I'm not 100% certain, but you may run into a hard limit of 2 097 152 or 4 194 304 due to fixed point notation. If you need more then that, you are going to have to 'optimize' your code to display only visible particles. Goodluck, let us know how it turns out.

For a super realistic simulation of debris as you describe, is there a specific reason you are using 3D Gamestudio? I mean, the tool is great for making video games, but (as the name implies) that is it's relatively narrow purpose.

For an application like you describe, I would write the simulation from the ground up in OpenGL

-Joe Hocking
www.3darteest.com

Thanks for the numbers Doug. With some optimization, this should be good enough. As for why I'm using GameStudio for the simulation, I'm already using GameStudio for another application and the debris cloud simulation is, at this point, more of a feasibility study that I decided to throw in. If it really blossoms into something big, I might learn to code OpenGL.

I find the engine to be really powerfull with non-game related things. Though I havn't wrote anything big with it yet. I do intend to try and write a ping application with it.
Future goals: Build a OS off of A5