allow decreasing the number of particles for the GL renderer

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drfrag
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allow decreasing the number of particles for the GL renderer

Post by drfrag »

Could the number of particles slider for software be made to work with the GL renderer? I see the number of particles has a massive performance impact, on 10 year old machines the game freezes for several minutes on some maps with water splashes and certain mods such as BD. For instance an explosion or a lot of blood on water. As expected they won't run well on somewhat modern machines either. So could this number be reduced in some way for increased performance?
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Re: allow decreasing the number of particles for the GL rend

Post by _mental_ »

Maximum number of particles, r_maxparticles CVAR, is not specific to renderer and will apply the limit in both on them.
Summon some particle spawners (tens of GreenParticleFountain for example) and change the limit to its minimum value of 100. The difference is obvious.
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Graf Zahl
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Re: allow decreasing the number of particles for the GL rend

Post by Graf Zahl »

Aside from that I see absolutely no point to add options that only make sense when playing new mods on old hardware.
You are maintaining your port for legacy hardware. If that needs such a feature, implement it there but I prefer not to get stuck in the distant past.
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drfrag
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Re: allow decreasing the number of particles for the GL rend

Post by drfrag »

But those controlled by the CVARS are a different kind of particles, i think software particles in GL.
There are other particles from mods, that setting will have no effect with them. Not even r_particles.
I know people with modern machines have complained and i think this could be a problem. If my athlon64 machine hangs for a minute or more i expect the experience will not be great on much faster computers. What should be considered acceptable then? Five seconds?

I was playing antarc.wad on MAP07, i went down to the green slime and shot a few demons. But actually the game crashes sometimes so it was not only a slowdown as i thought. This is with a patched Brutal Doom.

I don't know how to implement it, as expected. Where is the code to draw those GL particles from mods BTW?
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Graf Zahl
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Re: allow decreasing the number of particles for the GL rend

Post by Graf Zahl »

drfrag wrote:But those controlled by the CVARS are a different kind of particles, i think software particles in GL.
There are other particles from mods, that setting will have no effect with them. Not even r_particles.
Those are not controlled by any engine CVAR, these are particle like actors spawned by the mod. You will have to edit the mod to get rid of them, for the engine they are not detectable as something special.
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drfrag
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Re: allow decreasing the number of particles for the GL rend

Post by drfrag »

Understood, thanks.
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