Particle Effect Abuse

[Sunshine]

So particle effects are awesome and all, and allow wonderful creativeness, but theirs a few bad apples abusing it intentionally to lag rooms/suck up light, whatever they can manage to ruin vrchat experience for anyone around them, just wondering if this is going to be addressed, maybe limit / block certain effects, its a shame such a small annoying group are intent on ruinning vrchat experience for all, and giving vrchat devs a headack in the process, and for the ones participating in this annoyance, you're not impressing anyone with your lack of skills to 'create' something constructive and beautiful

[sleepy]

its especially bad when you have a vr headset and it gets super ♥♥♥♥♥♥ laggy and you get naucious feel sick cause of it

[MarioBrax]

I agree completely. The developers need to do something about this already.

[Katty Nat]

Very few people are able to make avatars with particles that don't break headsets, so as a rule I just block anyone who has particles without a second thought.

Would be nice to save me the effort and just make it so particles stopped working so headsets can stop breaking, but eh... the very few devs VRC has have something more pressing, like the issue of being able to pick a username and load any of their saved avatars, regardless of who's where... yeah fixing that might be more important. Oh well.

[Sunshine]

I thought they addressed that problem Natty, the main issue with alot of these hacks is the server side isn't checking anything, what the client says goes

[Bamboot]

It's crazy that unity defaults particles to 1000 or so when you make a new particle effect. I always scale mine back to 20, which essentially is 20 extra polys,when avatars are in the 10s of thousands of polys. But, I hope others are also reducing the particle emmissions to a reasonable level when making them in Unity. I gather not everyone does this?

Particles can be great, if handled responsibly. So, I am an unapologetic, yet trying to be intentional and considerate, particle user. I test my stuff and rebuild/tweak it often to be pleasant and unintrusive, and try to keep the particles localized, not all over the map. However, I can completely appreciate OP's concerns. I've seen some of those abrasive or trolly particles, and they can be annoying. I'm sure some people have probably found my particles annoying, but most times, the reaction is great, and draws and enthusiastic crowd. So, most particles, I find pretty fun and atmospheric in game. You never know what someone might have up their sleeve and that's a big part of the fun for me, is seeing the custom animations etc that people have created.

If you are worried about lag or framerate with custom avatars, this is an excellent read (must read if you are a new designer) on avatar optimization, what causes lag, some common misconceptions, and the effect of various stuff like particles, materials and textures on lag. I learned a lot and was able to greatly optimize my avatar from said info. It's so critical, imo, I'd love to see it stickied as so many people are learning to make avatars for VRChat.


From the VRCat Forums:

https://vrcat.club/threads/what-is-optimization-and-why-is-it-important.65/

Good luck! And make sure to optimize those avatars (and particle effects). You don't want to be that one guy lagging out the room.

[sleepy]

So if polys don't affect performance why is there a limit?

[Bamboot]

Haha that's a good question. I model really, so I am ignorant more or less on the back end. So, I rely on people like Tupper to learn what I can, or at least what I need to know to be a more effective modeler.

From a design standpoint, at some juncture, they probably said, ok, if players are uploading avatars, we should put some cap on polys (and size, and volume etc) for player models, so what sounds reasonable. Maybe it has to do with file size? Maybe a worry that poly limits would get pushed to the point it would start making a difference?

I would guess that no poly cap, like left comepletely to the user, would lead to insane poly counts which at the 50k or 80k might not have much effect but when it gets to the millions or something could be problematic? Or maybe, as I said, it's arbitrary or based on other factors. That's my best guess.

Tupper has a lot more posts sticked in steam and on the other forum, it might be answered in there?

[Sunshine]

Just to be clear I`am not advocating to get rid of particle effects, as I do enjoy most of them, however I would like to see some sort of limitations in the sdk and enforced 'server side' to discourage this small minority of punks who are using it for malicious intent only

[Bamboot]

If the SDk could limit particle emission from unity, and notify the user on upload, that'd be pretty great as needed for optimization. I think the default setting of 1000 could be resulting in a lot of high count effects if players don't bother to change it.

[Hydra]

Actually the number of particles does not matter, the lag comes from the number of rendered particles. You could have a million particles set in Unity, but if you set the particles to emit at a slow rate and dissapear quickly then you are not going to lag. To fix this lag issue, we could just limit the amount of rendered particles.

[Big Boss]

Originally posted by Natty Cat:

Very few people are able to make avatars with particles that don't break headsets, so as a rule I just block anyone who has particles without a second thought.

You must be fun to be around. Blocking knuckles, spammers etc, sure.

But blocking someone the minute you see the tiniest particle? Jesus christ.

[Bamboot]

At Hydra, I agree mostly. I'm no expert, but as far as I can tell, Yes, in a situation where all the particles decayed very quickly and were set to emit low, the total number wouldn't matter so much as they wouldn't ever be rendered all at once. But, that's also a pretty specific effect relying on short decay and low emission to be accurate. Yes, in that case, total wont' matter. But it's also something that not everyone is going to build and is pretty specific. Some will make higher emit particles that stick around a sec. where total becomes a bit more of a factor, in my limited experience. I just think starting with a lower default number could end up with more efficient builds, depending on what is needed from the effect.

As far as I can tell, doesnt particle total directly determine the total number of particles than can be rendered as part of the animation to begin with?

So, in a different situation, say a 3 second animation where the particles had a longer decay, that total number would matter because it would translate to more available rendered particles, scaling with the emit rate, decay length, and duration. Like if your total is 1000, and your duration and emit are high enough, you will get 1000 rendered particles available over the length of the animation. But, if the anim called for more particles than were available total (due to length or emit being too high or total being low), there is a gap in the animation until it looped as the particles run out. So, if the particles don't decay quickly, a high total seems like it would directly increase the total rendered particles, which seems to me, just the other side of the same coin. So, I'm not sure based on my limited understanding if total doesn't matter at all, or if anyone should set it to a million, UNLESS they had fast decay and low emission, lol. I agree though, that limiting total rendered particles in game would be a good solution, and sounds cleaner, since emission rate is also related to other variables like speed, length and total to determine rendered total. Or am I really not understanding something about how this works?

[Hydra]

What? If there was a limit to how many particles could be spawned in at a time then it doesn't matter what your particle lifetime is.

[Fluffy Bunny of Despair]

Just give people the option to completly "mute" particles.

[Katty Nat]

Originally posted by Big Boss:

You must be fun to be around. Blocking knuckles, spammers etc, sure.

But blocking someone the minute you see the tiniest particle? Jesus christ.

I guess you don't know what running VR on a minimum spec rig is like?
I've been frozen or even crashed out so many times by particle arseholes that this is the only solution.