Particle rendering priority?

I once did this experiment in Spring 91.0:
I find map that have multiple geothermal smokes and zoom at only 1 smoke and opened debug view to check for particle count.

Smoke from other geothermal vent contribute to particle count, but when particle limit is reached smoke in front of me is shown less and less and can even disappear completely.

Some weapon effect are shown even particle limit are reached (such as missile trail), while some disappear completely (such as purple sparkle in Buoy's bullet).

I don't think there is intelligent particle limit in Spring 91.0 .If its smart, it should've ignored particle outside my view and count only particle that is in front of my screen.

Shield generators take up particle limit and always seem to be drawn first (In fact they seem to be ALWAYS drawn, even if exceeding the particle limit).

It's mostly hardcoded stuff though, I don't think we have particle priority for cegs.

Anarchid it would be great to prune the particale generators for the strategic/tactical nuke explosions first before any other particles.

norm0616 SupCom2's aesthetic sucked.

quote: I think it would be cool to have shields use very few particles until they get hit

like this? i like it.

GoogleFrog, I agree we need to see not only shield position, but also strength. The coloration of a shield is something I consider important, but I think that shields could be much more transparent until they come under fire. That would limit particle spam from shields in the back and significantly lower particle counts from shields in combat.



Consider a picture like this where most of the shields are close to transparent, but the one that got hit is very easy to see and makes for a nice contrast. Although I think these graphics would load down most users, I think the general concept could reduce particle count while making shields look more interesting.

Increasing transparency would not decrease shield particle count. As far as I can tell shields are made of a small number of sections and each of these is a shield. Mess about with a shield at the edge of ALos to see how it is divided up into particles.