- I suggest that each particle emitter module should have an own menu segment on how that specific module changes with particle emitter scale.
Example:
You spawn particles on a sphere or in a cube. The effect is attached to some fancy geometry and the artist/leveldesigner places that blueprint at different scales throughout the level. With the current system things just break or or get very complex very quickly. You can hack something together with blueprints, but you don’t get easy direct access to all values and developing such a system is a pain.
If you had per module control in the emitter you could do things like:
Emitter position matches underlying geometry
Sprite scale changes OR does not change depending on how you want the effect to scale
Amount of particles spawned changes wit object scale
Color changes with object scale. (Think fires and energy barriers…)
Forces could also be scaled by emitter scale to preserve the impact of the animation.
Sprite animation speed could be adjusted to have better impact with scale.
You could even activate and deactivate emitters (for example, depending on a a threshold value for scale in x). This could be even used to create a kind of lodding and particles could drastically change in appearance based on scale.
Particles would be easier to create and could be set up to be far far more flexible. It would also make behavior very clear, because currently it is not clear how particle effect modules scale with emitter scale.
- On a semi-related note: Animation trails and ribbon trails should be consolidated so that they do the same thing in different context. This would make them more versatile and it would make animation trails easier to test and showcase.