Particle Candy Bug?

Community Forums/Developer Stations/Particle Candy Bug?

Gabriel

(Posted 2004) [#1]

I've been doing a lot of long, long stress tests and just got an error within Particle Candy's UpdateParticles() Function.

I get an "Entity Does Not Exist" on this line :

x#  = EntityX    (Emitter\Piv,1)

Now I don't mess with the pivots myself, and I've seen that Particle Candy only free's the pivots itself if you call FreeEmitter ( which I don't ) or you call FreeEmitters() ( which I don't )

So I'm wondering if any other PC users have observed this and found some kind of solution ( or even found the cause )

I'd email the author, but hey, it's three weeks since I emailed him about the last bug and he hasn't replied to that yet. So I figured I'd try here as well.

Dreamora

(Posted 2004) [#2]

So far I haven't had any problems with missing entities or other stuff.

did you use the ClearWorld command of Blitz3D? this clears all stuff as well

Gabriel

(Posted 2004) [#3]

Good point. But, no, I couldn't possibly be calling ClearWorld in the middle of the update game loop, or the game would stop pretty quick, lol. It's only happened once in the month or so that I've had Particle Candy fully implemented in the game, which is what makes me think it's a PC bug rather than a bug in my code. If it was a bug in my code, I would have expected it to turn up at least slightly more often.

skidracer

(Posted 2004) [#4]

Is the emitter parented to anything?

Gabriel

(Posted 2004) [#5]

Good thinking, and yes, it does have a parent, but no, I never free the parent during the game, and I free the particle system completely before freeing the parent.

Maybe Particle Candy just plain doesn't like you using parents? I can't see why it would matter providing you don't parent the emitter to something and then free the parent, but I'll try just adding a little function that repositions the emitter at the position and rotation of the parent instead of actually parenting it. Worth a try, I suppose, though I haven't managed to find a way to provoke the error again and I've been trying everything.

Dreamora

(Posted 2004) [#6]

Hmm perhaps the entity got into a windows own garbage collecting due to some dumb reasons.

I don't think that it really is a Blitz3D or Particle Candy problem because the emitters are done as pivot for exactly that reason: using them like normal entities for all stuff ( set is a child to a room for example to hide it together with the room. a little change to the code and it is frozen then :) )