How to make a muzzle flash particle effect repeat itself?

[rishi sunak]

In case the title was a bit too scarce, I am working on an animation where a character sprays a minigun, I'm using muzzle flash effect particles, the CS:GO ones to be more specific.

After loading in the particle and setting it up, I noticed that it only fires once, my question is, how do I make it repeat itself instantly after it finishes?

It's for an animation where the character constantly sprays his weapon and it wouldn't seem realistic to only have one muzzle flash.

[Marco Skoll]

Most of the time, it's manual. Every muzzle flash is a separately timed particle, because that's how the game actually handles it and because you want it to be properly synced with the audio (it looks really odd when the muzzle flashes and sound effects are at a different rate).

There's a "constant" flash for things like the TF2 minigun, because that has such a high rate of fire (which makes it a lot harder to see when its unsynced), but not for the regular assault rifles.

[rishi sunak]

That's what I have feared, would you mind telling me how to use the constant flash from TF2? I would highly appreciate it, thanks man

[Marco Skoll]

I can't help with that. I know that the muzzle_minigun_constant particle exists (at least, I think that's the name), but I've not yet had reason to use it.

If it has any quirks, I don't know about them.

[R234]

It's a continuous particle system, so you just set the emission duration to how long you want it to fire for, and the lifetime a little longer to give the particles time to decay.

[rishi sunak]

Hey man, this worked perfectly, I used the particle mentioned by Marco, unfortunately, it's a bit too big, I've tried looking for tutorials as to how to I can resize it, but unfortunately, I was unable to replicate the steps.

One of them was actually replied to by R234 and it was mentioned that resizing depends on the particle itself, I hope I'm not asking for too much, how can I make this particle smaller?

[R234]

Instance the particle system and look for initializers and operators pertaining to scale, such as radius random. Don't forget to look at its children's initializers and operators too. You may also want to edit the position within sphere random initializers if they appear too spaced out, and the movement basic operators if they move too far. the controls are mostly named logically.

[rishi sunak]

Hey man, I've tried following your instructions and I wasn't able to figure it out, the only thing that was remotely close to scaling was a single column that was simply called "radius", I tried fiddling with it to see if anything would change but unfortunately the muzzle stayed as it is, there was nothing to expand under both initializers and operators, this has really left me confused, sorry if it's too much to handle.

[R234]

There should be. Are you sure you instanced the particle system and expanded its particlesystemdefinition array?

[rishi sunak]

Originally posted by R234:

There should be. Are you sure you instanced the particle system and expanded its particlesystemdefinition array?

I am sure of that, what I did was after instancing and expanding the particle system definition array on the element viewer, I looked for anything related to scale, there was only one column called radius, I changed it many times with no luck.

After that, I tried going into the particle element viewer, duplicated the particle itself, and added radius random and radius scale in the initializers and operators section, after doing that, I tried changing radius_min and radius_max, but it still wouldn't budge or change, am I even doing this right?

EDIT: I tried changing the numbers as big as 50 and as small as 0.01, still nothing, once again, I'm using the muzzle_minigun_constant particle

[rishi sunak]

Update: I gave up and switched to the muzzle_minigun_constant_starflash particle, however when looking into it a bit more I noticed that the muzzle_minigun_constant particle did not have any of the operators or initializers and I had to add them myself, meanwhile the rest of the constant particles(including constant_core, which essentially seemed the same as constant) already had the initializers and operators added, I haven't tested yet but I will theorize that this was the reason why I could not get it to change size.

Thanks for everyone's help anyways, appreciate it!