• Godot Help

  • Particle System seems unviable in a lot of cases

Hey!

Like a lot of other devs, I come from Unity and I've been playing around with Godot to try and port a small jam game. I'm getting used to it and I enjoy most of the workflow. My main gripe is the particle system. I'm having a really difficult time with it and I feel like I'm doing something wrong

From what I've seen, Burst particles are almost "impossible" to make without custom code. I'll make a list of the different pain points, maybe I just haven't used the system the right way:

  • It's a pain to play multiple One shot systems at once. Both in Editor when creating the VFX, and in game when calling the VFX. Right now what I'm doing is I'm selecting all systems and checking the Emitting box for a preview. And in game, I've had to create a specific script to play multiple Burst particles with their references

  • Which brings to another problem. When I'm making changes to 1 system, I need a preview of this specific system among the other systems of the VFX. The only way to do it, is to scroll back up and reselect all of the systems and then check the Emitting box

  • There's no Delay property. Especially for Bursts, it's important to be able to create slight delays between the different systems

  • The Amount property seems like a strange choice. Rate over time and Burst Amount have been working really great on other engines

I really hope I missed something, as I've been enjoying the engine so far °°

  • xyz replied to this.

    Menthalo There's a very powerful fundamental concept in Godot that can help you deal with such problems - scene instantiation. Every game entity can, and mostly should, be represented by an instantiable scene. So wrap your particle system into a scripted scene and you'll be able to handle all of the above mentioned problems. But yeah, you'll need some code.

        Also it might be worth looking up some plugins or external editors to see if one of them might serve your purposes better.

        I know I've seen some people use Material Maker(itself made with godot) in combination with godot particle shaders/system to make some cool effects.

        Also there's Effekseer that might be of some interest perhaps:

        https://github.com/effekseer/EffekseerForGodot4

          xyz I've been starting to think that yeah. I think a bunch of Tools are necessary to haev an efficient workflow

          • xyz replied to this.

              Menthalo You're probably just accustomed to doing things certain way. What you ask here can be set up in minutes within a regular Godot scene. Although I do agree having a dedicated vfx editor may be neat.