Particles... [SOLVED]

[newborn]

Before I cry wolf, has anyone else experienced issues with particle systems? I personally have problems with the particle editor tool that comes with TV3D, which seems to crash for some very random reason (can't track why, never the same reason). Same goes with my own editor, but when it crashes, it stop on the line TVScene.RenderAll(True) which doesn't help me at all to debug what exactly is causing all these silly problems.

[newborn]

Some updates:

As per Sylvain's suggestion, I made couple of modifications to my coding (getting the particle system updates out of the render loop for instance), but to no avail, still have some random issues.

So this morning, I decided to change TVScene.RenderAll to :

Sub Render()
  _tvScene.RenderAllMeshes()
  _tvScene.RenderAllParticleSystems(True)
End Sub

And I can confirm that it's def. a problem with the rendering of the particles.

Even if I'm not updating anything, just load a particle system and wait for a while, it crashes at the line _tvScene.RenderAllParticleSystems(True)

[newborn]

More on this... seems to crash only when I used keyframes

edit: with more tests, it seems to only happen with particle systems that have Keyframe Emitters

[newborn]

Okay, we found what was the problem, it was indeed related to keyframes.

If, for instance, your particle emitter has a lifetime of 5 seconds but your keyframes are set to go under that frametime (last frame at 3 seconds for instance), then TVParticle will raise an exception.

Thanks Sylvain, you're the man! (he's also going to add a safe check for that issue in the next release or so)

[SylvainTV]

Thanks for finding the bug :p