Activating particle emitter disables Jump in Character Movement

Development Character & Animation
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1

Encountered a weird issue over the weekend, and can’t for the life of me figure out what’s going on. Basically, the final node in a blueprint activates a particle emitter. That works as intended, however, the moment the emitter activates, my third person character loses the ability to jump. The emitter in question - a GPU emitter using fixed bounds - isn’t touching the character or anything - it’s a reasonable distance away.

I’d post a screenshot of the bp, but the rest of it is irrelevant and works perfectly; the final node is a simple “Activate” targeting the particle. If I disconnect that, everything works perfectly. Reconnected, the moment it activates, the character can’t jump.

While the character is suffering from this inability to jump, if I teleport the character away to a different location, he can suddenly jump again. Also, if I have the particle system activated from the moment the game begins, I can jump once but only once - as soon as I land, Jump stops working.

I’ve debugged to death, and the “Jump” node is definitely firing, it’s just failing to do anything.

So, TL;DR…

Is there any reason activating a GPU particle emitter with fixed bounds might interfere with the “Jump” node in a third person controller?

2

Thanks for getting back in touch. Although not fixed, I did manage to bypass the issue in the end. Originally, I included a deactivated emitter as part of a larger blueprint which was later activated when a certain condition was met. This was when the problem occurred. To get around it, I didn’t add the emitter to the blueprint itself; instead, I simply spawned in a brand new emitter actor that was already activated from the start once the condition was met, and this seems to have prevented whatever weird bug was occurring. So, not really fixed, but bypassed, and I can live with that for now!

Didn’t want to mark this as resolved beforehand in case you were going to give me a nicer solution, but feel free to mark this as answered/closed now. No further help needed, thanks.

3

Hi pootiki,

Not that I know of. Unless the GPU particle is so taxing to your system that it’s causing a pretty severe FPS drop. But you should have noticed that if it were the case.

Any screen shots of your setup would be helpful (how you are activating the particle system and how the jump is handled). Feel free to upload a small test project if that would be easier.