How to deactivate particle system on demand?

I have a laser beam represented by a particle system in a sidescroller. The way I have it set up now is that it gets created, and then its source and target points change depending on character and mouse position.

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The problem is I can’t seem to be able to delete it before it completes its loop(s).
I tried “Destroy Component” on the Particle System and it didn’t seem to work.

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I know I can set the number of loops and emitter duration in the Required Tab in the Particle System Editor. However I would like to be able to kill it as soon as the player releases a key. You know, like toggling a laser sight in a gun.

I have thought about creating and deletign particle systems with very short lifespans every frame but that seems pretty inefficient to me. Is there a way to deactivate a particle system on demand?

Any thoughts?

Alright so I replaced Spawn Emitter Attached with Spawn Emitter at Location, and it seems to work correctly now. Still
not sure why it wasn’t working with the emitter attached to the gun.

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Hey MDMD-

Glad to see that you got everything working the way you wanted. As a tip, it would be more efficient to turn the emitter off/on each time rather than having to destroy/create the particle system each time the player releases/presses the button.

Thanks for the tip. I tried turning off the emitter by using the “Set Emitter Enable” function, however there is about a second of delay between the button release and the emitter dissapearing. I thought it was maybe to do with the “emitter duration” value which I changed from 1 to 0.1, but still the same.

Any idea where I’m going wrong?

Not sure what to say off the top of my head but I can look into it. What do you have set for the lifetime and spawn rate of the particle?

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I tried playing around with those values, decreasing the rate to 0.1 seemed to increase the time the laser beam stayed around after the button release. I tried increasing it to 200 it didnt seem to change much. I’m new to the whole particle editor thing I think I’m just not understanding the values correctly.

I’m gonna look at some tutorials

Hey MDMD-

We have not heard from you in a few days. I hope you were able to solve your problem with deactivating your particle system on demand. I am marking this post as resolved for tracking purposes, however feel free to respond to this message if you are still experiencing the same issue.

Thanks.