TGB Particles Corrupt Themselves?

#1 Are you working in 1.1.3? There was a bugfix concerning some particle file corruption. Might be related. But if you weren't editing them anyway, I don't know.

#2 Actually I am working in v1.1.2, so maybe that's the problem? I'll see what the new version holds, thanks.

#3 Would you believe I never had this problem until I read your post. What happened to me is the effect disappeared but when I looked and what was wrong was the image for the particle was no longer selected. Not a disaster normally but when I reselect the image the particle effect is a mess. It looks like it spilled the defaults I set. It's definately corrupting the particle effect itself because I happen to have imported most of them from test levels so I reimported the effects and the problem went away. Unfortunately I had tweaked all the effects after bringing them in so I still lost hours of work. Once I get an effect set I'm going to have to back up the particle effect. Already having to do a large number of back ups due to other corruption problems so it's a bit depressing.

#4 I noticed the following:

Run your game from Torque Game Builder (so no export, just press play). Then stop it and return to TGB. Then drag some particle into the scene, modify it, and safe it. It will be corrupted. If you don't run the game first this never happens, so once I found out the reason, it was easy to avoid it. Still a pain in the ass though.
Oh, and I'm using 1.3

#5 That's bizzare, I'll try it. I just realized that machine still has 1.1.2 so I'll install 1.1.3 before I try anything. I updated my older system but forgot to the newer machine. It's definately a bug either way.

Thanks for the heads up that would have taken a lot of trial and error to have caught.

#6 Still having sprites corrupt and I had both run Play Level and done saves. I just hope they resolve this bug in version 1.5. It's driving me nuts. I'm not even going to bother with particles until the game is completely done. I'm wasting too much time redoing sprites from corruptions.

#7 @Cary: Sprites corrupting, too?

I have redone my levels a few times now, particle effect wise and it's driving me nuts aswell. As I stated elsewhere, particle effects shouldn't have the size stored in them as it is stored in the instances of the scene objects.

As an example... In my levels I have swamps and a particle system for bubbles that spawns the particles on the whole AREA. I drag the particle systems in the level and resize them to fit each swamp. After that the editor asks me to save them if I run the level and it works all fine and dandy... everything is the way it should be. But then, if I go back to another level, the same particle effect is messed up there...

#8 The only solution I've found is to copy the particles into another folder then when they corrupt copy and pasted the file back into the games/particle folder and they'll work fine again. I tried the things suggested and I thought it was working then they started corrupting again. Sometimes I can install them on a couple of levels and some times they corrupt right off. Just once you get a working effect back it up while the game is running and the effect is working fine. I'd say to wait until you are ready to build the final game then copy and paste all the backed up particle effects into the game folder then build the game without testing it.

I'm hoping it gets addressed in 1.5. There's some save issues for me with 1.5 so I haven't really used it much. I use it to test sprites because the sprite builder is a lot faster than before.

#9 It's not addressed in the 1.5 beta anyway, I get this once in a while too.

I haven't really had time to look into what the problem is but it's not the whole particle effect file that get corrupted. It's something with the emitters because sometimes if you have an effect with several emitters only some of them get corrupted while some still work fine.

#10 What happens for me is it looses the image file so the emitter is blank but it also resets the emitter so reloading the image doesn't help. It seems like it clears the emitter's information.

I hope it gets addressed in 1.5. multiple people are having the problem and it's a real headache.

Real excited about 1.5. With just behaviors and the revised animation builder it's a huge upgrade to me. There's just a few bugs like that I hope get addressed.

#11 I don't know about anyone else, but I know that when I do particle effects it's a lot of guess work. Therefore when effects get corrupted 1/5 times while saving them, life becomes frustrating. I also don't know why you can't save and load emitters in the editor like you could in the original editor. But that's another ball of wax.

#12 It's a bit annoying yeah. I just make sure I back up my effect files once in a while.

The saving/loading of emitters should really be in there though. (It's actually not too difficult to put back if you're comfortable with messing around in the scripts, the actual FUNCTIONALITY is still there. I do it from the console once in a while).

#13 I was driven to the brink of insanity because of particles that kept being replaced with the dreaded: Emitter_8 or Emitter_6, I was just surprised it wasn't: Emitter_666.

The particle system is in fact the Anitchrist. . .how strange.

#14 The workflow I ended up with is once I get a particle effect working I back it up in a separate file then once the game is finished I just drag them across and overwrite everything. I also don't do particle effects until the game is done. They tend to be a waste of time. I like the particle generator and I've done some cool stuff with it. I'm hoping to do a blog post to show what I've been up to in a week or so. I actually came up with an underground level. It's a boring machine that leaves behind a tunnel using particle effects. It took some tweaking but I made a dug up soil disk and had the particle generator drop them in place then move downward to roughly match the background movement. There's a curve to the particle speed so the effect isn't perfect but it's surprisingly effective.

#15 Has this been fixed in 1.5.0? That would be... awesome. :)

#16 If anyone is interested... the problems remain. It can drive you nuts, especially if you earn a little money with making particle systems. :p

#17 Yup still happens in 1.5.1
I just saw it for the first time in a while today.

#18 Particles didn't save properly since the Early Adopter days of this engine. I don't know why myself... I already dug into the source code and couldn't figure it out.

#19 This has been logged into our bug system, thanks for all of the reports.

#20 I hope it gets addressed soon. It's a critical bug and it seems like it's been falling through the cracks for a long time. It makes it a pain to add particle effects.